Russia is a collector of failed states. Several of them decorate its borders, like a grisly necklace of severed ears. The many festering wars along Russia's frontiers - in Transdniestria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh - are a big reason why the newly independent states of the former Soviet south have failed miserably, and these serial failures have allowed the Kremlin to maintain its position as power-broker.
At the heart of each of these conflicts is some self-proclaimed mini-state, whose rulers prevailed by dint of Russian arms and advisers. These statelets share many of the same pathologies: harsh, militarised societies with economies built on corruption.
South Ossetia, which wants to be Russian, is run by a motley crew of Russian officers and mountain gangsters. It is the same for Abkhazia, another breakaway province of Georgia always on the verge of war. Abkhazia's rump government is staffed by Russian colonels. But after presidential elections that handed the presidency to the non-Kremlin candidate in October, Putin threatened to isolate the province.
Belarus is run by an iron-fisted ice hockey fan modelling himself, and his impressive moustache, on Uncle Joe Stalin; the southern "stans" - Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan - are invariably run by former KGB strongmen, whose ruling families are starting to marry dynastically.
The maddest of the lot is Saparmurat Niyazov, the ruler of Turkmenistan, who has a different coloured wig for every day of the week and claims to have written a follow-up to the Bible and the Koran - the Ruknama. It is mostly about how best to grow cotton.
Until the last few weeks, Ukraine would have been numbered among the quasi-failed states fringing Russia. This was brought home to me when I was in Kiev over the summer. All the talk was of Viktor Yanukovych's decision to run for president. Yanukovych, the regime candidate, a six-foot-six bruiser from the eastern province of Donetsk, has two convictions for assault. It would be unthinkable in any normal democracy to have such a man running for president. But Yanukovych was Russia's favourite, and by extension the Ukrainian president's choice, and so Russian spin doctors - the Kremlin phrase is "political technologists" - did their best to make him palatable to the electorate. Old ladies were handed cash, coalminers at Yanukovych rallies were entertained by strippers and fed free porridge, and civil servants were awarded a spontaneous 20 per cent pay rise.
Given the closeness of its cultural, political and economic ties to Ukraine, Russia believed it had a right to help to choose the successor to President Leonid Kuchma. But unlike Abkhazia or Transdniestria, Ukraine is a country the size of France, with a population of 48m. Rather than use the Red army, the instruments of Kremlin foreign policy are now Gazprom, the world's largest gas company, and UES, Russia's electricity monopoly run by former Yeltsin kingmaker Anatoly Chubais. And Ukraine still owes Russia billions of dollars in gas debts.
Putin prizes rulers who can monopolise local corruption. And of the three business clans that have carved up Ukraine's economy, Yanukovych's Donestsk clan is the most avidly pro-Russian. The other two clans - in Kiev, Kuchma and his son-in-law Viktor Pinchuk and in Dnipropetrovsk, Serhei Tyhipko - are also allied to the government but less pro-Russian.
The opposition too has some "big businessmen" in its ranks, but the way that power and money feed off each other in Ukraine means that they have nothing like the same political clout as the clans. Yanukovych's opponent, Viktor Yush-chenko, supports a more transparent democracy and an open economy - which would challenge the power of the current business clans.
Yushchenko's deputy, Yuliya Tymoshenko, was once an oligarch herself, but is now a street fighter in peasant plaits and Dolce & Gabbana. It is she, more than anyone else, who has provided inspiration to the 100,000-odd protesters camped outside the Kiev parliament buildings.
"She comes to speak to us every day," says Katya, a member of Pora, the youth organisation inspired by Otpor (the group that brought down Slobodan Milosevic's government in October 2000). Such groups also emerged, with some help from the west, in Belarus and Georgia to oppose the clannish politics of their rulers, with varying degrees of success. Student protesters in Belarus were beaten savagely, but in Georgia they helped to end the reign of ex-Soviet foreign minister Edvard Shevardnadze.
In Ukraine, they are poised on the verge of victory. But if the opposition is successful when the second round of voting is re-run on 26th December, it will still face two big problems. The first is what to do with the clans. On this issue, Tymoshenko is unusually hesitant, perhaps recalling the fate of Serbia's former prime minister, Zoran Djindic, who was assassinated for trying to break the mafia.
I asked her when we met a few weeks ago if she and Yushchenko can break the power of the regional barons: "However much they oppose the new system, they will have to obey it," she said. "I would not want to destroy anyone as they have tried to do to me, but if they break the law we will have no hesitation in sending them to prison."
Perhaps more pressing, though, is the question of how to deal with a humiliated Russia - a Russia that cannot even control election results on its doorstep, while America reshapes the middle east. It is likely to try to regain control of Ukraine in the way it has over other former colonies: by fostering local insurrections to divide it, or interrupting the westward flow of gas, which Ukraine relies on for 85 per cent of its annual needs. Predominantly Russian-speaking regions east of the Dneiper river - which contain most of the country's raw material wealth - are already being encouraged to break away from Kiev, and Donetsk is due to hold a referendum on 9th January. If it passes, Russia may unilaterally offer citizenship to the eastern Ukrainians. It may even use its Sebastopol navy bases to foster insurrection among the Cossacks, who resent the recent incorporation of Crimea into Ukraine.
Defusing these threats is critical if Yushchenko wants to win a genuine victory and real independence for his country. The Boxing day vote marks just the start of Ukraine's revolution.
