A convoy of supporters of Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko was reconsidering Saturday whether to travel to the eastern stronghold of his opponent, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, after a tense standoff with Yanukovych backers who blocked their way in a southeastern region.
Dozens of angry ethnic Russian Yanukovych supporters staged a blockade late Friday as the convoy -- some 50 cars draped with Yushchenko's orange colors and carrying mostly artists and musicians touring the country to campaign for the opposition leader -- sought to cross onto the Crimean peninsula, said convoy coordinator Olga Khodovanets.
The convoy traveled on to the Crimean capital Simferopol, where Yushchenko's backers showed videos and photos of the massive opposition protests that swept the capital Kiev for two weeks after Yanukovych was declared the winner of the Nov. 21 runoff against Yushchenko.
Yushchenko won a Supreme Court ruling that threw out the runoff results because of fraud and ordered a repeat vote Dec. 26. The convoy, with about 150 people, is traveling around this France-sized nation of 48 million trying to sow support for Yushchenko in eastern and southern regions where Yanukovych received more votes.
Fearing possible violence in Yanukovych's hometown of Donetsk, Yushchenko's supporters were reconsidering whether to set out for the eastern city yesterday or today and whether to travel without protection.
The leadership in the Donetsk region, the heart of the largely Russian-speaking east and south where Yanukovych draws his support, threatened to hold a referendum on autonomy as a hedge against a victory for Yushchenko, who is more popular in western and central Ukraine.
They recently canceled plans for the referendum, but tension has persisted ahead of the new vote. Yanukovych said Saturday that he could not rule out unrest after the Dec. 26 vote and that supporters might travel to Kiev to protest if they consider the balloting unfair, according to news reports.
"People are just getting ready to defend their rights, their choice. They will not allow discrimination against them," he told a news conference after a rally in the southern city of Odessa, in a comment broadcast on state-run Russian television.
The US had refused to recognize the result of the runoff, and a US delegation led by Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican, met Saturday with outgoing President Leonid Kuchma to call for a free and fair rerun.
"We will cross our fingers for Ukraine," Rohrabacher said after the meeting.
The decisive vote comes after revelations that Yushchenko was poisoned during the campaign.
On Friday, three separate laboratories in the Netherlands and Germany confirmed that Yushchenko was poisoned with pure TCDD, one of the most toxic chemicals. The tests also confirmed that Yushchenko's blood contained 100,000 units of the poison, the second highest concentration ever recorded.
In an interview with reporters on Thursday, Yushchenko accused the authorities of poisoning him in an attempted "political murder" to push him out of the race, and said he was probably poisoned at a Sept. 5 dinner with Ukraine's security agency chief Ihor Smeshko and his first deputy Volodymyr Satsyuk.
Satsyuk, who hosted the meal, in an interview Saturday with Kiev's Stolichnye Novosti denied any involvement in Yushchenko's poisoning.
He said he was ready to meet Yushchenko in public. Yuriy Pavlenko, a pro-Yushchenko lawmaker, said Saturday that opposition leaders have been "unable to establish Satsyuk's whereabouts" since Wednesday, when parliament speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn told deputies that Kuchma had fired Satsyuk.
Ukraine's election strained relations between Russia and the West, with each accusing the other of interference, but Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov expressed confidence Saturday that the issue would not create a new divide.
"If somebody gets into his head the idea of building a new wall between Ukraine's eastern border and [Russia], I think that would just be such clearly recidivist Cold War thinking that most European countries, and the United States too, would rebel against it," Lavrov said on Moscow's TV-Tsentr.
Lavrov said Ukraine must be free to determine its future.
"We are not forcing friendship on anyone," he said. "We have no monopoly on the post-Soviet space, but ... we operate on the assumption that nobody else has such a monopoly, either."
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of
A prominent Christian leader has allegedly been stabbed at the altar during a Mass yesterday in southwest Sydney. Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was saying Mass at Christ The Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley just after 7pm when a man approached him at the altar and allegedly stabbed toward his head multiple times. A live stream of the Mass shows the congregation swarm forward toward Emmanuel before it was cut off. The church leader gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, amassing a large online following, Officers attached to Fairfield City police area command attended a location on Welcome Street, Wakeley following reports a number