Vitaly Kizima, an election monitor at Zhovtneve in Ukraine's Sumy region, watched in horror as 30 men in tracksuits stormed into the village polling station.
Ukranian riot police
"They started to beat voters and election officials, trying to push through towards the ballot boxes," he told The Telegraph.
"People's faces were cut from blows to the head. There was blood all over."
(photo caption)
Riot police guard the Ukranian presidential administration compound in Kiev
The thugs - believed to be loyal to the pro-Russian presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovich from his stronghold, Donetsk - were repulsed only when locals pushed them back and a policeman fired warning shots.
The catalogue of abuses in the contest between Mr Yanukovich, the prime minister, and his opponent, the pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko, is growing longer by the day.
Ukraine is split, with the western, Europe-leaning regions voting overwhelmingly for Mr Yushchenko while the eastern part of the country - where many speak Russian - backing Mr Yanukovich.
Maya Syta, a journalist working at polling station 73 in a Kiev suburb, witnessed ballot papers destroyed with acid poured into a ballot box. "The officials were taking them out of the box and they couldn't understand why they were wet," she said.
"Then I saw they started to blacken and disintegrate as if they were burning. Two ballots were wrapped up into a tube with a yellow liquid inside. After a few moments they were completely eaten up."
In her polling station, 26 ballots were destroyed and had to be invalidated. Six other cases were recorded of ballots destroyed by acid.
The most common trick was "carousel" voting, in which busloads of Yanukovich supporters simply drove from one polling station to another casting multiple false absentee ballots.
In another brazen fraud recorded by observers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, voters were given pens filled with ink that disappeared, leaving ballots unmarked and invalid.
Mr Yushchenko has refused to accept the election results, which gave him 46.61 per cent of the vote against 49.46 per cent for Mr Yanukovich. The figures are due to be reviewed tomorrow by the Supreme Court, although it cannot reverse them.
Diana Dutsyk, a member of Mr Yushchenko's campaign team, claimed that "dead souls" - late citizens' ballots used by imposters - were also used to augment his opponent's share of the vote.
And late last week Mr Yushchenko's headquarters released an audio recording in which senior members of Mr Yanukovich's campaign team were allegedly caught red-handed discussing how to fix the election result.
In the telephone conversation, a member of the team can be heard saying that he ordered a local election commission to disqualify votes.
Mr Yanukovich denies rigging the vote and claims that a "small clique" of his opponents is trying to divide Ukraine.
But mediators, including Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, have hinted that a new election should be called and President George W Bush, said the world was "watching very closely" after Washington called the result into doubt.
Both candidates enjoy genuine support but election observers say that Mr Yanukovich's team used its bureaucratic muscle to rig last Sunday's election in his favour.
"The openness and cynicism of the manipulation was unprecedented," said Olexander Chernenko of the Committee of Voters of Ukraine (CVU), an American-funded organisation that has monitored elections for more than a decade.
About 11,000 complaints have been lodged so far with regional courts.
Mr Yanukovich has described the protest movement as an attempt at an "anti-constitutional coup"; Mr Yushchenko sees it as the "people's self-defence". But the scale of the indignant response from hundreds of thousands of protesters who swept onto the streets - and the extent of the election fraud - are a reflection of larger forces at work.
The state of almost 50 million people, crunched between East and West, was once Kievan Rus - the proto-state that gave birth to the Russian nation. Many in Moscow still think of the country as a southern province.
In recent years, a resurgent Russia under President Vladimir Putin has sought to reassert control over Kiev. Ukraine is an important pipeline route for Russian oil and gas, and a friendly regime will not impose high transit fees.
The country's Black Sea port of Sevastopol is also home to Russia's southern naval fleet, offering easy access to the Mediterranean.
Moscow is pushing for the creation of a "joint economic space" in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine - a project that Mr Yushchenko has said would dilute the country's sovereignty.
Mr Yanukovich, who has a criminal record and links to shady business magnates, is backed by Mr Putin, and draws his support from Russian-dominated eastern Ukraine.
However, Western countries such as Britain and the United States support Mr Yushchenko - who promises a turn towards Europe and pursuit of Nato membership. His supporters have been wooed with millions of dollars from the United States.
In turn, Mr Putin did what he could to support his preferred candidate. Immediately before the election, he made two high-profile visits to Kiev to meet Mr Yanukovich and the Ukraine's President, Leonid Kuchma.
Russian advisers, including a leading Moscow spin doctor, Gleb Pavlovsky, were said to be in effect running the prime minister's campaign.
Despite talk of an East-West showdown, many Ukrainians protesting about the election result say that Mr Yanukovich's criminal background is unacceptable, not his bias towards Russia.
The prime minister was twice convicted for robbery and battery in his youth and is seen as the protege of a group of business oligarchs known as "the Donetsk fellas" from the eastern region where he was once governor.
"How could they dare try to impose such a bandit on us?" asked Yuri, who was ferrying protesters to Kiev's Independence Square yesterday in a car festooned with orange streamers. "We will never accept it."
By Tom Parfitt in Kiev and Colin Freeman Filed: 28/11/2004
© Telegraph Group Limited
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