Ukraine's Supreme Court on Tuesday lifted a ban on publishing election results proclaiming opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko the winner, appearing to pave the way for Yushchenko to assume power as Ukraine's president.

The court made the ruling after Yushchenko, who, according to preliminary results, won the Dec. 26 presidential runoff by about eight percentage points, asked the court to lift the publication ban.

Last week, the court banned the publication of the results pending its review of rival candidate Viktor Yanukovych's complaints. Yanukovych has called on the court to annul the results on grounds of fraud and set a new round of elections.

In its ruling Tuesday, the Supreme Court refused to hear any more procedural complaints in the case, which will speed up the proceedings, and said the results of the re-run election could be published in official government papers beginning Thursday.

"The court has ruled ... to set Jan. 19, 2005 as the deadline of the publication ban," court chairman Anatoly Yarema said, meaning the ban expires on Wednesday and the first day for publication would be Thursday.

Publication in official newspapers of the results would give parliament the right to set an inauguration date, which Yushchenko's aides said could be as soon as Friday.

Representatives of Yanukovych denounced the Supreme Court's decision as politically biased, and warned it would undermine the country's stability and aggravate political tensions.

The ruling came on the second day of the court's hearing of Yanukovych team's latest appeal over the Dec. 26 presidential election results. Both camps believed the judges would rule on Wednesday.

The court has rejected a series of appeals from Yanukovych's team, and the new complaint of some 621 volumes of documents and 233 videotapes is the team's last-ditch effort to overturn the election.

The Dec. 26 election was a rerun of Nov. 21 run-off in which Yanukovych was declared the winner. The run-off was followed by massive opposition protests, which eventually led to the revocation of the election.