Early official returns Monday from Ukraine's presidential election show that former Prime Minister Leonid Kuchma has won with 52 percent of the vote, convincingly defeating the incumbent President Leonid Kravchuk, who garnered 45 percent.
Preliminary results from Ukraine's Central Electoral Commission showed that Kuchma collected 14.6 million votes to Kravchuk's 12.1 million, according to initial tallies from Sunday's election that drew nearly 72 percent of Ukraine's registered voters to the polls.Kravchuk, 60, conceded defeat through his spokesman Nikolai Khomenko.
In addition, 39-year-old Alexander Lukashenko, a charismatic former collective farm director whose anti-corruption crusade has earned him popularity, was elected president of Belarus.
Lukashenko, who swept the ex-Soviet republic's first presidential elections Sunday with 80 percent of the vote in results tallied Monday, has promised a sweeping purge as soon as he takes office.
Lukashenko is a native of the city of Mogilev, east of the Belarussian capital of Minsk, where in his youth he was a leader of the Komsomol, or Communist Youth League, and a student of history and economics.