Donetsk, January 23 (Interfax) - The CIS Inter-Parliamentary Assembly mission to monitor the second round of the presidential election in Ukraine is alarmed by reports that an influx of Georgian citizens to Ukraine similar to that recorded before the first round of the voting might take place again before the second round on Feb. 7.
"We have information coming from the candidates’ campaign staffs that travel companies have started to reserve rooms for Georgian citizens at Donetsk hotels from February 5 – the matter involves hundreds of citizens of that country," Alexander Torshin the head of the CIS Inter-Parliamentary Assembly monitoring mission and a first deputy speaker of the Russian Federation Council, told Interfax on Friday.
A similar situation before the first round of the elections alarmed the accredited monitors, Torshin said.
He explained that several thousand Georgian citizens not registered as monitors entered Ukraine in the wake of the first round of the election.
"We met with the heads of Viktor Yanukovych’s and Yulia Tymoshenko’s campaign staffs in Donetsk and were shown copies of documents produced by these Georgian citizens, which identified them as monitors or freelance contributors to Ukrainian media outlets, including the Luhansk-based newspaper Molodogvardeyets," Torshin said.
Ukraine has never seen a similar influx of citizens of other countries during election campaigns, Torshin said.
"At present, the Ukrainian Central Elections Commission has not made a decision on increasing the number of foreign monitors before the second round of the presidential election," he said.
The monitors were familiarized with facts of "aggressive conduct of these so-called Georgian observers and their attempts to visit polling stations," he said.
