"But as for election rigging, certainly less attention is paid to Yanukovich's counterclaims. Seeing as he's the prime minister, it's somewhat hard to envisage how an opposition candidate could possibly have an even vaguely comparable scope for tampering with the election as he had." -- need I point out that the job of a truly impartial observer is not to "envisage", but to report the facts? Especially if the said observer knows how Ukrainian political system functions...
"So, the long and the short of it is that when Yanukovich claims the opposition rigged the elections, I simply don't believe him - it falls on its own absurdity." -- your problem is that you have no clue of the realities of Ukrainian politics, but you presume to believe or disbelieve something. Rigging of elections is done at local level, especially during the process of drawing up voter lists, by local electoral commissions and activists. Who in the East just happen to be Yanukovich sympathizers, and in the West -- Yuschenko sympathizers. Same goes for local governments, who would enable the electoral commissions to operate with impunity. The prime minister has no power to rig anything directly, besides "strongly encouraging" civil servants to vote for him. Which in reality did not happen, because Kiev bureaucrats came out in favor of the opposition.
In this case your reliance on "beliefs" is forgivable in light of your lack of familiarity with Ukrainian political system. But when it comes to professional western observers, who should've known that, I find it extremely hard to believe that this was a result of simple incompetence as opposed to regular dishonesty.
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