Ukraine’s presidential election has yielded the worst possible outcome. The pro-Russian Prime Minister, Viktor Yanukovich, claims to have won decisively, despite exit polls that showed him trailing. His pro-Western challenger, Viktor Yushchenko, denounced the result as a “total falsification”, accused the Government of inflating the turnout and rigging the result, and has launched a movement of “civil resistance”. His supporters have promised to remain on the streets until victory is theirs, while the Government has brought in water cannons and armed police and given a warning that it will not tolerate “revolution”. The scene is set for a bloody confrontation, with repercussions across Europe and a sharp worsening of relations between Russia and the West.

The election certainly appeared flawed. The run-off was necessary because Mr Yushchenko forced the Prime Minister into second place in the first round but was unable to win a decisive victory. Since then, the outgoing President Kuchma has used every means available to skew the campaign in his protégé’s favour: much of the media has been habitually biased and campaign rallies have been disrupted. The President refused to sign a Bill last week aimed at halting fraudulent multiple voting with absentee ballots. And in towns in eastern Ukraine, the Prime Minister’s stronghold, turnout on election day apparently reached an extraordinary 96 per cent, according to the election commission. Western observers said the vote did not meet the standards of the Council of Europe or other basic measures of democracy.

The challenger and his supporters understandably feel cheated, and want to force a different outcome with protests, mass demonstrations and organised resistance similar to the uprisings that ousted the Milosevic Government in Serbia and and Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia. They would be well advised to wait. The election commission will not give its verdict until Monday and has until December 6 to announce a final result. The Opposition should explore all legal routes before it resorts to direct action.

It is too early to declare the result clearly fraudulent. Exit polls are not a reliable substitute for ballots, as elections in America and Europe have often shown. What is obvious is that divisions in Ukraine run deep. Since independence 13 years ago, the country has had such a dismal economic and political record largely because it has failed to bridge the gap between the agricultural west, whose economy, history and Church look to Poland and the West, and the mining areas of the east, where Orthodox Russian-speakers felt more at home in the old Soviet Union.

This division is reflected now on a geopolitical scale. An increasingly assertive Russia, suspicious of Nato and EU enlargement, sees Ukraine as integral to its attempt to create a cordon sanitaire. President Putin used two recent visits to intervene shamelessly in support of Mr Yanukovich. His opponent, by contrast, wants to pull Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and open it up to the West. Europe’s support has been almost as partisan: Bernard Bot, the Dutch Foreign Minister, speaking for the EU, expressed hopes that Mr Yushchenko would win. President Bush said America would review relations, and aid, if the vote were unfair. With so much at stake, the Opposition should remain, for now, on the moral high ground. And Moscow must understand that the world is watching.