KIEV, Jan. 13 (Xinhua) -- Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko on Wednesday warned of possible fraud in the upcoming presidential election slated for Sunday, urging the West to help prevent any fraud.

    "A conscious disruption of the election process is going on," Tymoshenko told a government meeting, saying that opposition leader Viktor Yanukovich's party was organizing mass fraud in the east of the country, his main power base. "Such monstrous falsification didn't even happen in 2004," she added.

    Meanwhile, she instructed the Foreign Ministry to give foreign diplomats information about possible vote fraud, so they can appeal to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to intervene "as soon as possible."

    "I would like to address... the heads of diplomatic missions in the country... and inform the international community that the state's key leaders are covering up a simple disruption of fair polls and arrangements for a large-scale fraud in Ukraine," Tymoshenko noted.

    At the same day, a Ukrainian court banned all mass rallies on capital Kiev's Independence Square for the next three weeks, local media reported.

    The Kiev Administrative Court ruled in favor of a demand by local authorities to ban rallies from January 9 to February 5 because so many parties -- including Yanukovich's Regions Party --wanted to stage demonstrations during that time.

    Campaigning for the coming presidential election are 18 candidates, including current President Viktor Yushchenko, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and opposition leader Viktor Yanukovich.

    Though local pundits do not expect any of the candidates to win the first round outright, they do think Yanukovich and Tymoshenko are the most likely to face each other in the run-off slated for Feb. 7.