“THERE WILL be no revolutions,” President Kuchma said, as his government tried to persuade Ukrainians that the man he appointed Prime Minister two years ago had now won an election to succeed him as President.

Tens of thousands of protesters in orange bin-liners yesterday said Mr Kuchma was wrong. He may yet have the last, self-satisfied laugh. It is anybody’s guess how long the protesters will be prepared to occupy the streets in the bitter cold of Ukraine in November and, in any case, the country is divided between Ukrainians and ethnic Russians for whom the legions in orange do not speak.

It also a problem when Western governments bang the drum for democracy and then condemn elections of whose apparent “winners” they happen to disapprove. But on Ukraine we should all be very clear: Viktor Yushchenko, the progressive, Nato-friendly nationalist opposition candidate, was robbed.

Even if history clears Viktor Yanukovych, his Kremlin-backed opponent, of massive ballot-rigging, Mr Yushchenko was still robbed of anything approaching a fair campaign. Four out of five national Ukrainian TV channels are state-controlled and virtually ignored him. Newspaper journalists thinking of investigating government corruption well knew the fate of Gyorgi Gongadze, who tried it four years ago and ended up in a shallow grave outside Kiev, beheaded.

Mr Yushchenko is no angel. His supporters are doubtless guilty of some of the tyre-slashing and intimidation of which they have been accused. But this has been the scrappy street fighting of David confronting the Goliath of an unreformed Soviet-style apparat, complete with a renamed but equally unreformed KGB.

Mr Yushchenko’s claim to have survived an attempt to poison him is, unfortunately, credible. So are last week’s descriptions by police whistleblowers in eastern Ukraine of being ordered to guard stores of half a million fake ballots pre-marked for Mr Yanukovych. Despite ludicrous claims of turnouts of more than 95 per cent in some pro-Yanukovych districts, every polling organisation except that of the Yanukovych campaign gave the vote to his rival by a wide margin.

For President Putin of Russia to have called the campaign “hard-fought, open and honest” is staggeringly dishonest.

Much simplistic comment has been written about this election as a choice for Ukraine between East and West. Ukraine will never “choose” the EU over Russia because it could never afford to, and such a choice would be a betrayal of its past. The Russian Orthodox Church and, arguably, the idea of Russian nationhood, was born in Kiev, not Moscow, 1,000 years ago. Many of Ukraine’s ethnic Russian minority trace their roots in the country almost as far back — and owe their livelihoods to the now creaking Ukrainian infrastructure that was built on Soviet orders.

Ukraine was the brain of the Soviet military-industrial complex. It still builds and maintains aircraft for Russia (and heavylift cargo jets for the world) and depends exclusively on Russia for its oil and gas. It would be folly for any Ukrainian leader to attempt to turn his back on Russia.

The great sadness to emerge from Sunday’s vote is not geopolitical but moral. One year after Georgia’s Rose Revolution, 13 years after the almost bloodless dissolution of the Soviet Union and 15 after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in Ukraine placemen still rule. Some power and much wealth has bled from the bureaucracy to the oligarchs who run the country’s privatised industries, but the edifice remains fundamentally corrupt. This is why Mr Kuchma can still think of an election as somehow revolutionary, and to a remarkable extent it is Mr Putin’s fault.

The die for this fraudulent election was cast five years ago, on New Year’s Eve, 1999, when Boris Yeltsin resigned without warning and handed Mr Putin full power in the Kremlin. It was not so much a defeat for Russian democracy as an admission of defeat, and its effects elsewhere have been profound.

Until Mr Yeltsin’s departure, Russia — then still on a rowdy road to democracy — had been a far more powerful force for change within Ukraine than had Europe. Since then the Kremlin has offered Ukraine a grander version of the compact that Mr Putin has offered Russia’s own fissiparous regions: stability in return for subordination.

Moscow is entitled to strenuous assurances from Nato that its inexorable drift towards Smolensk is a peaceable one. Ethnic Russians in Ukraine are equally entitled to scrupulous respect from Kiev for their human rights. But if Mr Putin’s meddling in this election has truly been driven by concerns for Russian national security, it betrays a worrying paranoia; and if it is a reflection of his own lack of esteem for free and fair elections, the prospects for Russian democracy are bleak indeed.

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