According to the Central Election Committee, Yulia is 3.5% behind Yanukovych so far (74.43% of the vote counted).

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The map of the vote looks the way it always does - one half red and one half blue, as if we indeed need to split Ukraine into two and each have the president we prefer. But it's not that simple, of course.

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The only surprise of the first round for me was that Yulia got only 6.5% in Luhansk region - despite having Natalya Korolevskaya run things over there.

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The only surprise of the second round so far has been that two people I have huge respect for decided not to abstain from voting for Yulia after they spent some time at the Feb. 5 Yanukovych concert on Myhailivska Sq. As I wrote earlier, you had "to get real close & hear it to really understand" why it was such a shockingly awful experience - and I shouldn't be really surprised that it had the same effect on these reasonable and determined people as it had on me - and actually I'm not. It's just that I had thought that nothing could force them to change their minds and end up "choosing typhus over cholera" or "eating the less smelly chunk of shit" - but the abyss between Yulia's event on Sofiyivska and Yanukovych's bacchanalia on Mykhailivska turned out to be too blazing to ignore.

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Here's a video of Yanukovych supporters marching past me while Volodymyr Hryshko, an opera star, is singing a 1964 song (Beauty Queen/"Королева красоты") for them, in Russian:



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While I was writing this and editing the video, they've counted some more votes (83.95%), and the distance between Yulia and Yanukovych has shrunk to 2.59%.

Also, Zakarpattya has become the first region with all the votes counted: Yulia won with 51.66% (279,631 votes) there, while Yanukovych got 41.55% (224,917 votes).

In the city of Sevastopol, the second location with all the votes already counted, Yanukovych has 84,35% (178,201 votes), while Yulia's are 10.38% (21,940 votes).