Follow-up on Ukrainian elections

I posted about it yesterday and several diaries addressed this issue/offered updates.  Now, with 99% of votes counted, Putin's favorite Yanukovich is leading.  This is in spite of the fact that late exit polls from yesterday had pro-western economist Yushchenko leading by impressive 11%. By the way, Washington was backing Yushchenko, as pro-free market, pro-reform candidate.  So now they are in the position to question the results based, among other things, on the discrepancies between exit polls and final count.  Isn't that ironic? As KumarP pointed in his diary there is an obvious double standard here...
This is the link and an excerpt is below the fold.

"Senator Richard Lugar, the senior US observer of the Ukrainian presidential elections said that the government helped rig the vote in favor of the pro-Moscow Prime Minister, Viktor Yanukovich. Meanwhile, Kiev city council refused to recognize the results of Ukraine's presidential runoff and urged the nation's parliament follow suit. The move came after two other cities in Ukraine's opposition-dominated west, Lviv and Ivano-Frankivks, refused to recognize the disputed results. Both cities proclaimed opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko the winner of Sunday's vote, even though official results appeared to hand victory to his pro-Russia rival, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich. "It is now apparent that a concerted and forceful program of election-day fraud and abuse was enacted with either the leadership or cooperation of governmental authorities," Senator Lugar, the chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters.
With 99.14 percent of polling stations reporting, the pro-Russian prime minister, Viktor Yanukovich, secured 49.42 percent of the vote, compared with 46.69 of Western-leaning Yushchenko."