The prospect of defeat left Yanukovych supporters disillusioned with what they saw as the theft of their candidate's original victory.
"I can promise you that Yushchenko's supporters will be very disappointed," said Yelena Bushuk, 21, an economics student who studies in the capital, but who is from Donetsk, a Yanukovych stronghold in eastern Ukraine. "I feel very sorry for those people who were kneeling before Yushchenko like zombies. Is that democracy?"
Supporters of Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko celebrate his apparent victory in the presidential race in Kiev's Independence Square.
(Petar Kujundzic -- Reuters)
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Bushuk said, however, that she thought that people in eastern Ukraine, some of whom had threatened to break away from the rest of the country if Yushchenko won, would accept the result.
"It would be stupid to keep replaying this," she said.
Yushchenko, whose strongest support has been in western and central Ukraine, has said he plans to reach out quickly to Yanukovych voters in the eastern parts of the country. Yanukovych supporters fear that Yushchenko will attack their Russian identity, including their right to speak, study and work using the Russian language. Yushchenko said such fears were unfounded and that he planned to go to Moscow in his first official visit abroad.
The Yanukovych campaign said, however, that it would stall Yushchenko's plans to assume power quickly and would challenge Sunday's result.
"The violations had a massive and systematic character according to the complaints we have received from the regions," Tara Chornovil, Yanukovych's campaign manager, said Sunday night.
On the eve of voting, the country's Constitutional Court invalidated new election rules that restricted voting at home by people with disabilities, ruling that anyone who couldn't reach a polling station should be allowed to vote at home. Western monitors and the Yushchenko campaign said such voting had led to massive stuffing of ballot boxes in the prior round of voting.
Although monitors said the ruling created some confusion and variations around the country in how to apply the rules, they thought the uncertainty would not affect the outcome.
"There were no major, systemic violations," said Ihor Popov, head of the independent Committee of Ukrainian Voters, a nonprofit group monitoring the vote.
But the Yanukovych campaign said the confusion would be the basis of some of their legal appeals, and they noted bitterly that a number of people had died after making it to polling stations, not knowing that they could vote at home. Ukrainian television showed what was said to be a dead 70-year-old man lying on a stretcher, his body covered by a sheet, in a polling station in the Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine.
"This is on their conscience," Yanukovych said.
In the Donetsk region, meanwhile, a woman gave birth to a boy at a polling station. She named the baby Viktor.
