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In the first round of its presidential election on Sunday, Ukrainian voters will have a choice between its current president, a former prime minister and an unlikely third candidate -- a comedian best known for a TV show where he plays a man who accidentally becomes president. It is the comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who is currently favorite. With no candidate expected to receive more than 50 percent in the first round of the vote, polls show Zelenskiy has a strong chance to win the presidency in a second round next month. Zlenskiy, 41, is an actor and stand-up comic who...

KYIV - The choice is stark. Stay the slow and not-quite-steady course with a deeply unpopular but seasoned leader who knows the ropes and has taken Ukraine westward despite foot-dragging on reforms and a failure to tackle entrenched corruption. Go with another veteran, a political survivor with a dodgy past twice imprisoned by opponents who has lost two presidential elections but is banking on public disappointment and populist promises to carry her to victory. Or take a chance on a comedian with no experience in politics and governing but who has managed to tap into an antiestablishment mood similar to...

KIEV, Ukraine — After his name surfaced last August in a secret ledger listing millions of dollars in payments from a pro-Russian party in Ukraine, Paul Manafort not only lost his job running Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign but also assumed center stage in a bizarre internecine struggle among Ukrainian political forces. On Monday, the intrigue took another turn, when a member of Parliament in Ukraine released documents that he said showed that Mr. Manafort took steps to hide the payments, which were tied to Mr. Manafort’s work for former President Viktor F. Yanukovych. The documents included an invoice that...

Petro Poroshenko wins Ukraine's presidency in the first round, according to the results of two national exit polls, with approximately 56 percent of the vote. Ukrainians elected Petro Poroshenko to be their fifth president in a vote that was dubbed "the second independence referendum." Poroshenko won his presidency in the first round, according to two exit polls. The poll conducted by four TV channels showed that he received 57.8 percent of the vote. The national exit poll, conducted by a consortium of reputable survey takers, put Poroshenko at slightly less -- 55.9 percent of the votes, but still a clear...

Boxer-turned-politician Vitali Klitschko on Saturday pulled out of the race for Ukraine's president, throwing his weight instead behind a billionaire businessman.....Klitschko's withdrawal from the presidential race would set up a battle between confectionary businessman Poroshenko and Ukraine's former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, in the May 25 elections. After more than two years in prison, Tymoshenko was released in February following Yanukovych's ouster, her archrival.

Former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has said she plans to run for president of Ukraine in May elections. Ms Tymoshenko was released from prison in February after three years in jail following the toppling of President Viktor Yanukovych. She has already served twice as prime minister and ran for president in 2010. She was a major figure in the 2004 "Orange Revolution" that ousted Mr Yanukovych from the presidency after an election widely seen as fraudulent. 'Direct action' Ms Tymoshenko said she would stand as "a candidate for Ukrainian unity". She told reporters that she had earned the right to...

By Gene J. Koprowski Published 12/27/2004 11:41 AM CHICAGO, Dec. 27 (UPI) -- The court-ordered election rematch in Ukraine this past Sunday, featuring opposition presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, probably would not have happened were it not for mobile phone technologies.The technologies -- text messaging services in particular -- enabled hundreds of thousands of youthful demonstrators to coordinate their activities and take to the streets of Kiev to contest the November election results, experts told UPI's Wireless World."The most significant aspect of this thing is the mobilization of the population," said Lubomyr Hajda, associate director of...

Senate Foreign Relations Cmte. Chairman Richard Lugar (R-IN), Pres. Bush's envoy during the Ukrainian election, testifies before the House International Relations Cmte. on what he observed and learned during his trip to Kiev last month. Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL) chairs the hearing. NOTE: scroll down to "House Hearing on Ukraine"

Doctors at the Austrian clinic that treated Ukraine’s opposition leader confirm there was a plot to kill him MEDICAL experts have confirmed that Viktor Yushchenko, Ukraine’s opposition leader, was poisoned in an attempt on his life during election campaigning, the doctor who supervised his treatment at an Austrian clinic said yesterday. Doctors at Vienna’s exclusive Rudolfinerhaus clinic are within days of identifying the substance that left Mr Yushchenko’s face disfigured with cysts and lesions, Nikolai Korpan told The Times in a telephone interview. Specialists in Britain, the United States and France had helped to establish that it was a biological...

How and Why the Elections were Stolen, part IV A A friend who's a Reuter's journalist in Eastern Europe forwarded this photo to me. It shows a vote tally sheet from the Ukrainian elections. For those of you who don't read Cyrillic, Yanukovych received 2,139 votes, no one else received any. I think Kim Jong Il's opponent gets more votes than that. I had to shrink it for my blog so it's a bit blurred at the top, but am happy to email the full-size copy to anyone who emails a request. Posted by Discoshaman at 02:54 AM | Comments...