Yanukovich presses Ukraine rival to concede defeat

With just over 97 percent of votes counted, official election figures gave Yanukovich a margin of 2.41 percentage points over Prime Minister Tymoshenko.

But a Central Election Commission official told Reuters that Yanukovich remained the winner of Sunday's vote.

With a complete picture still to come in from voting in his strongholds in the south and east, the gap with Tymoshenko was expected to increase rather than shrink further, Commission member Mykhailo Okhendovskiy said.

Analysts said the slender gap might encourage Tymoshenko, who earlier warned Yanukovich against celebrating victory prematurely, to press for advantage or contest the result.

"The situation is developing in favor of going to the courts and some sort of deal," said Viktor Nebozhenko of the Ukrainian Barometre center. "It is not really clear who has won. The forces are more or less equal."

"If it is 3 percentage points or less it is contestable. The temptation will be there for her to make a challenge," said Andrew Wilson, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

But, as the fiery Tymoshenko remained uncharacteristically quiet, putting back a scheduled news conference by several hours, her rival pressed her to acknowledge the fight was over and not mount a challenge.

"Yulia Tymoshenko has repeatedly said that even an advantage of 10 votes is already a victory. We hope that an advantage of nearly one million votes will be an argument convincing enough for her to recognize our victory," said Yanukovich aide Anna German.

The Yanukovich camp said that a parallel count which it had conducted and which was now complete gave the opposition leader 48.96 percent over Tymoshenko's 45.41 percent.

Tymoshenko's camp, alleging fraud, had also offered a parallel count that saw her edging out her rival.

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