KIEV, Sept. 22 – A sharp exchange between President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych over alleged election fraud erupted over the weekend, signaling a standoff is looming ahead of the Sept. 30 election.

Yanukovych, in an open letter to Yushchenko on Friday, accused the president of fueling confrontation ahead of the election by “breaking earlier agreements, Ukrainian law and moral norms in politics.”

Yanukovych urged the president to take immediate steps to prevent the confrontation, “otherwise the country will be under threat of a new wave of political crisis.”

“All efforts for reaching national reconciliation and overcoming a civil split in the country will be in vain,” Yanukovych said. “You, Mr. President, will bear personal responsibility for possible deepening of the crisis.”

This is the first time that Yanukovych has publicly and personally accused Yushchenko of breaking unspecified agreements and warned about the looming crisis. It shows that relations between the two have been deteriorating rapidly.

Yushchenko reacted on Saturday by reminding that it was Yanukovych who had stolen “hundreds of thousands or even millions votes through fraud” during the presidential election in 2004.

“This man has given his word not to raise the issue of NATO, the Russian language, our difficult history and a dozen of issues that are sensitive for our society,” Yushchenko said. “But, unfortunately, this man rejected everything that he had signed.”

“Let the prime minister get back to morality and law,” Yushchenko said.

The outburst comes as the SBU, the country’s security service controlled by the president, has been apparently uncovering massive irregularities with voter lists in regions dominated by Yanukovych’s Regions Party.

In the Kharkiv region alone, the SBU uncovered 100,000 dead that had been listed as voters, according to Yuriy Lutsenko, the leader of Our Ukraine-People’s Self-defense.

For example, Yevhen Kushnariov, a senior member of the Regions Party and a former Kharkiv region governor who died in January after a shooting accident, was still listed as a voter.

Irregularities in drafting voter lists have been also found in other regions, such as the Donetsk region, the stronghold of the Regions Party. Listing voters twice, listing dead and listing thousands - an unusually high number - of citizens older than 100 years were a common practice, opposition groups charged.

“We expect that in each district the Regions Party will get extra 15% through falsifications,” Henadiy Zadyrko, an opposition activist in the Donetsk region, said.

In his letter, Yanukovych accused the presidential office of allegedly working on some unspecified measures that would reduce the showing of the Regions Party at the election.

But Yushchenko was quick to return the accusation.

“Those people that talk about future falsifications have apparently well-planned it,” Yushchenko said, adding with a Ukrainian proverb: “A criminal has got his hat burning.” (tl/ez)