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The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has found evidence of a campaign by Ukrainian authorities to coerce voters and falsify the results of last Sunday's presidential ballot in favour of Leonid Kuchma.
Findings will be published in mid-December, after which "it will be a matter for the OSCE member states to take further" said Simon Osborn, head of the OSCE observer mission in Kiev.
Mr Osborn said the large gap in votes between Mr Kuchma, the incumbent who received 56 per cent of the vote and Petro Simonenko, head of Ukraine's Communist party, who won 38 per cent, meant that the overall results of the election were unlikely to be questioned.
But the OSCE's findings may harm Ukraine's efforts to be taken seriously as a democracy. "Our concern is that they are breaking their own laws and their commitments to the OSCE," said Mr Osborn. The OSCE monitors elections worldwide.
The Ukrainian government is already under fire for harassing opposition candidates and blocking their access to the media during the campaign since May.
Mr Osborn said there was mounting evidence of "a calculated and organised campaign" in Ukraine's 3,400 hospitals and sanatoriums to ensure that patients and staff voted for Mr Kuchma.
They are also gathering similar evidence from "closed institutions" such as prisons and schools.
This factor alone could have affected millions of votes, said Mr Osborn. His teams are investigating numerous reports of local officials stuffing ballot boxes and using pressure tactics to ensure a high vote for Mr Kuchma. Olexander Martinenko, Mr Kuchma's press secretary, on Tuesday blamed any violations on local officials of regions "which have hardly ever heard of democracy," rather than on a centralised campaign by the government.
However, the OSCE has evidence to the contrary. A cable sent from the ministry of the interior in Kiev to a local administration office in the Poltava region ordered daily reports on "houses visited," "citizens residing in those apartments," and "the real number of citizens who were persuaded to vote for the incumbent president".
The OSCE also has a copy of an organisational chart drawn by a local administration in the Odessa region, according to which vote tally sheets from the local polling stations were to be sent to the local administration before being sent on the territorial election committee, a violation of Ukraine's election law. In practice this would make it possible to manipulate the tallies.
The OSCE has also recovered copies of vote tally sheets in which totals have been changed.
Mr Simonenko declared yesterday that the polls were "undemocratic" and has filed a legal suit alleging massive falsification.