KIEV, 30 November 2004 — Ukraine’s pro-Western opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko said that he would ask Parliament to vote a motion of no confidence in the pro-Russian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich today. “Tomorrow we will propose the dismissal of the Yanukovich government,” he told a massive crowd in Kiev’s central Independence Square yesterday. The vote would be nonbinding because under the Ukrainian constitution the Parliament cannot dissolve a government for one year after approving its program, which it did in March.
In a sign of the government’s will crumbling, President Leonid Kuchma, who had groomed Yanukovich as his successor after a decade in power, said yesterday that he was in favor of staging new elections in Ukraine to resolve the bitter dispute.
Ukraine’s supreme court yesterday began reviewing a request by Yushchenko to annul the results in order for a new election to be held. The Parliament has supported annulling the vote in a nonbinding resolution.
Yanukovich earlier yesterday had rejected opposition demands for his immediate resignation. “I want such a decision to be examined officially, its reasons to be explained and... I would want to see such a decision taken by the president,” he was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.
