Groups of Poles demonstrated across the country on Saturday in support of western-leaning Ukraine opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko, who claims he was cheated out of victory in his country's presidential election.
Russian-backed Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych has been declared the election's winner, but Ukraine's Parliament on Saturday symbolically declared the election invalid after a week of growing street protests and allegations of vote fraud.
"Brother Ukrainians, we greet you from Warsaw, we greet Viktor Yushchenko," Poland's first democratic premier, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, told a crowd at a protest concert in the capital amid chants of "Yushchenko, Yushchenko."
"We admire your peaceful struggle."
Elsewhere in Warsaw, some 100 demonstrators rallied outside the Russians Embassy, chanting "Ukraine without Putin" and flying flags with Yushchenko's orange campaign colour.
Earlier in the week, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski and his predecessor, Solidarity founder Lech Walesa, went to Kyiv in an effort to help find a solution.
Support for Yushchenko has cut across party lines in Poland, and in the western city of Gorzow Wielkopolski on Saturday members of the main opposition Civic Platform distributed orange balloons, ribbons and tangerines.
"When we watch television reports, we see a picture similar to the events in our country 15 years ago," an organizer, Robert Surowiec, told the Polish news agency PAP. "All that we can do now is to back such actions and show our neighbours in Ukraine that we are with them."
Activists in Zielona Gora, in the southwest, collected some 500 signatures in support of Yushchenko's claim, and a rally was held in the eastern city of Bialystok, organized by the Solidarity trade union and opposition parties.
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