AS THIS ARTICLE goes to press, it remains uncertain who will emerge the winner of Ukraine's presidential election. The official tally favored Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich by 3 percentage points, but momentum is with opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko, whom exit polls showed to be the actual winner. All credible electoral monitors denounced the vote as fraudulent, as did even one election commission official.

Tens of thousands of Yushchenko supporters remain mobilized on the streets of Kiev. The Ukrainian parliament has swung behind Yushchenko, the Supreme Court has annulled the election and called for a new vote, some of the prime minister's supporters have defected, and the guys with the guns have sent mixed signals about whether they would obey orders to repress the demonstrators.

Yet, the ancien régime has not given up. Pro-Yanukovich governors in eastern Ukraine have threatened to secede, and the lame duck president, Leonid Kuchma, is trying to secure constitutional amendments that would weaken presidential power as a condition of allowing a new election. If the stalemate drags on, the demonstrators' mood could shift, towards either radicalism or disappointment.

Whoever wins, Russian president Vladimir Putin is a clear loser. No matter what the endgame, Putin has suffered a serious setback because of the way he tried to deal with his most important neighbor. Putin's behavior has weakened Russia's influence in strategic Ukraine and damaged the Russian president's reputation in the West. It should call into question the Bush administration's embrace of the Kremlin leader.

Putin fancies himself a foreign policy pragmatist,

In Ukraine, Putin made his first aggressive attempt to consolidate "managed democracy"--his advisers' term for Russia's new regime-type-- in another country. Hoping to prevent a democratic breakthrough like those in Serbia in 2000 and Georgia in 2003, Putin's administration orchestrated a giant effort, first to aid Yanukovich's electoral campaign, then after the vote to blur the world's understanding of the results. (Kuchma's own government needed no technical assistance from Russia to carry out the actual fraud--adding votes to precincts, some of which then reported 100 percent turnout, with over 90 percent voting for Yanukovich.)

Campaign consultants tied to the Kremlin set up shop in Kiev, millions of Russian rubles poured into the Yanukovich war chest, and Putin personally visited Ukraine twice to campaign for the prime minister. On Election Day, Russia sent its own observer mission, which pronounced--surprise, surprise--the vote free and fair. Putin congratulated Yanukovich on his victory well before the official results were released.

But this effort was all for nothing. Putin's advisers accurately foresaw that Yushchenko and his supporters would protest the stolen election, and they expected some perfunctory criticism from mid-level diplomats in the West. But they also calculated that Ukrainian protesters would eventually go home to escape the cold. And they reasoned that the West, especially the Bush administration, would soon forget about the fraud, as more important issues like the war on terrorism resumed their rightful place at center stage.