Ukraine's presidency battle back in the courts

With the final result of the re-run election still to be officially endorsed, Mr Yanukovich - who claimed victory in the disputed first run-off election - lodged an appeal against the second poll’s outcome with the country’s supreme court.

The court is due to begin considering the appeal, which claims the vote was rigged, today.

Mr Yanukovich filed volumes of complaints with the central election commission, alleging mass fraud, but the commission threw out his appeal last week.

International observers have said that they saw no evidence of the mass vote-rigging that had marred the earlier vote in November, which Mr Yanukovich claimed he won.

His latest attempt to cling on to power came just hours after Ukraine’s outgoing president, Leonid Kuchma, formally accepted Mr Yanukovich’s resignation as prime minister.

Viktor Yushchenko, the west-leaning politician still awaiting official declaration of his victory in the Boxing Day poll, yesterday criticised his rival for delaying the democratic process.

"There was no need to torture the nation for so long," Mr Yushchenko said.

He gave no clues about his plans to staff a new government. "We will count on new names," was all he would say.

But his ally, the opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, made her move on the post of prime minister, saying she expected nothing less in return for her support for Mr Yushchenko.

Ms Tymoshenko said a pact she and Mr Yushchenko signed left no alternative than for her to head a new government once Mr Yushchenko is inaugurated.

"I believe that Viktor Yushchenko will follow our formal agreement - created when we signed our coalition agreement," said Ms Tymoshenko, whose elaborately braided hair, orange outfits and sharp tongue have earned her thousands of worshippers among the opposition.

Asked if there was another possible choice for prime minister, she replied: "There are no other alternatives."

Mr Yushchenko has already started discussing his first steps as president and has begun talks to name his cabinet.

His office has refused to comment on who is tipped to be prime minister, but Ms Tymoshenko’s name is a reg- ular on the list of those being considered.

"I don’t have any doubt that parliament will support my candidacy if Mr Yushchenko will propose it to the parliament," she said. She would need a simple majority of support from the 450-member parliament to win the post.

Side-by-side with Mr Yushchenko, Ms Tymoshenko was the political face of the mass movement dubbed the Orange Revolution, when thousands of opposition supporters flooded the streets of Kiev following the fraud-marred, second-round vote on 21 November.

She jumped on to lorries to rally the crowds, clamoured over a riot police line and repeatedly called for a forcible seizure of power from the opposition’s stage in Independence Square. At her behest, protesters stayed on the streets.

The supreme court annulled the election, citing mass fraud, stripped Mr Yanukovich of his victory and ordered the 26 December re-vote.

Some critics have suggested that naming Ms Tymoshenko to the prime minister’s job could deepen the division between western and eastern Ukraine, a rift the election vividly exposed.

Before joining Mr Kuchma’s foes, Ms Tymoshenko, 44, headed the now-defunct Unified Energy Systems, the country’s predominant gas dealer, where she pushed through energy sector reforms that angered influential tycoons but won her praise from Western observers.

She served as deputy prime minister under Pavlo Lazarenko, who was convicted in June in San Francisco of fraud, money-laundering and extortion. She was ousted from government in 2001, turning against Mr Kuchma and forming a faction in the Ukraine parliament.