KIEV: Cries of election fraud, furious crowds in the street, nervous police pondering mutiny as a beleaguered government wonders whether to impose a state of emergency - the dramatic first round of the upheavals which led to a change of power in Georgia last autumn and in Serbia four years ago may be about to re-emerge in Ukraine.
When voters cast their ballots on Sunday (Oct 31) to choose a new president, everybody expects the day itself will be calm. But the two main candidates' camps are talking up the danger of violence in the hours after the close of polls. Each side claims its man is ahead and the other will resort to dirty tricks or mass protests rather than accept defeat.
Six months ago few Ukrainians predicted such tension. One reason is that the contest is unusually close, with opinion polls suggesting that neither Viktor Yanukovych, the current prime minister who is the establishment candidate, nor his challenger, Viktor Yushchenko, has a clear lead.
The more significant factor is the extraordinary degree of foreign intervention in the campaign. One might have thought the US would have had enough on its plate not to be interested in Ukraine.
But the Cold War has never really died, and Ukraine is still seen as a powerful prize. Henry Kissinger was in Kiev last weekend, the latest in a recent string of high-level American visitors that included the republican senator John McCain and Richard Holbrooke, the potential next secretary of state if John Kerry wins.
They were aroused, it seems, by the outgoing president Leonid Kuchma's sudden change of line on Nato. Eventual entry into the alliance has been a key part of Ukraine's national strategy, approved by parliament, for some years. In July, shortly after meeting George Bush at Nato's summit in Istanbul, Kuchma reversed it.
Observers initially thought he was piqued by Bush's advice to him not to try for a third presidential term. But Yanukovych, Kuchma's favoured successor, is campaigning on the new anti-Nato posture and the Americans are angry.
They always preferred Yushchenko, who was identified during his time as central bank governor several years ago as a pro- American neo-liberal. He was bound to be Washington's favoured candidate in this year's election.
But it is mainly because of the Nato factor that the US has become much more engaged in recent weeks in denouncing the dangers of fraud, funding the exit polls which will be done on Sunday and financing the groups of activists who may take to the streets.
Ostensibly, the US says it has always merely wanted to promote democracy, and nothing has changed. The Kuchma government certainly has a record of intolerance towards critics. Several crusading journalists have been murdered. But Ukraine's political observers note that US complaints fell silent after Ukraine sent troops to Iraq last year.
They also wonder how much of a democrat Yushchenko is. He publicly compared supporters of one murdered journalist, Georgy Gongadze, to fascists. Like his rival, Yanukovych, he has links to oligarchic clans and served as a prime minister under Kuchma.
So some of Ukraine's grassroots democrats believe the election is only the latest round in the struggle to divide state property, with the current in-group fearing the outsiders will take away what it stole. In Russia the oligarchs are safe under Putin. In Ukraine insecurity still reigns.
Ordinary Ukrainians are in a difficult position. When Poland and Slovakia joined the EU this spring, they were left outside the fortress. Thirteen years after the euphoria of independence, it was inevitable that Ukrainians would rethink their future.
This comes as Russia, after a period of neglect in Yeltsin's second term, has revived its interest in Ukraine. It has settled Ukraine's massive energy debts and made a long-term agreement on supplying low-priced oil and gas.
Russia is also starting to create a "common economic space" with Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan which could lead to a free trade area. Whether this conflicts with Ukraine's original hopes of entering the EU is not clear, but Ukrainians feel the EU switched its priorities this year, with the focus of enlargement going to the Balkans and Turkey.
Brussels needs to correct the message. The Turkish experience has shown EU programmes to strengthen civil society can make a real contribution to a country's transition from authoritarianism.
Nato is a different case. The alliance has become nothing more than a tool of Washington's global policy, with an expansionist agenda that still includes a strong anti-Russian component, in spite of various programmes for cooperating with Moscow.
Ukrainians are right to turn against it. Whatever economic and diplomatic support their country needs can be got much better from the EU and, unlike with Nato, at no cost in international tension. -Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
