Ukraine's Next Chapter

FOR THE THIRD time in less than two months Ukrainians will go to the polls today to vote for a new president. Once again, the choice is between the outgoing prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, and one of his predecessors, Viktor Yushchenko. And again, the main issue is not the differences in the candidates' platforms or their foreign allies, though these are substantial, but whether Ukraine will shake off a corrupt and authoritarian political system and become a genuine democracy. Thanks to the popular "orange revolution" of the past month, democracy's chances are far greater than they were before the last two votes. But its victory is far from assured: More peaceful pressure from Ukrainian citizens and vigilance by Western governments will be needed in the coming days.

Thanks to the presence of some 12,000 foreign monitors, it should soon become apparent whether today's vote proceeds without the massive, government-organized fraud that occurred during the last vote, on Nov. 21, fraud that was designed to install Mr. Yanukovych as president. Polls show that Mr. Yushchenko will win a fair vote; he was the probable winner of the first two rounds and the hero of the hundreds of thousands of people who camped in the center of Kiev demanding that the fraud be reversed. His opponent, nominated by Ukraine's corrupt business clans and heavily backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, no longer speaks as if he expects to win. Instead, he warns darkly of Western conspiracies and threatens to launch his own, potentially violent, uprising after the election.

The danger of disruption remains: That's why the Bush administration and its European allies must insist that Mr. Putin respect the promise he made last week to accept Mr. Yushchenko if he wins the election. For his part, Mr. Yushchenko will need to reach out quickly to assure Russian-speaking voters in eastern Ukraine, where his opponent has a strong base. Mr. Yushchenko enjoyed good relations with Moscow in his earlier term as prime minister, and he must restore them if Ukraine's economy is to flourish. He also wants warm relations with the West, and President Bush and European leaders should be ready to support Ukraine and its young democracy. Already, though, Mr. Yushchenko's hopes for Ukraine's rapid integration into Western institutions such as NATO and the European Union have been rebuffed by some European governments. Mr. Bush and other Western leaders still shrink from openly challenging Mr. Putin's neo-imperialist ambition to restore Moscow's dominion over most of the former Soviet Union.

The manifest Western ambivalence about Ukraine underlines the absurdity of portraying the elections as a U.S. plot to isolate Russia or a geopolitical contest for influence, as Mr. Putin and his circle often have. In fact the only threat Mr. Yushchenko poses to the Russian president is that he will consolidate the institutions of liberal democracy in Ukraine that Mr. Putin has sought to stamp out in Russia. The West, in turn, has been guilty only of nourishing democracy's roots in civil society -- a legitimate and worthy cause. Ukraine's political transformation would have occurred far more smoothly had it not been for Russia's malign intervention. It need not now become an East-West struggle unless Mr. Putin insists on making it so.