Machiavelli Redux: a triumph of Putinista Politiking?

I was planning to post about Woodrow Wilson today; and what I've learned about America's dysfunctional relationship with the outside world (and how that odd double-think of imposed values and self-obsession comes from; and Russia in particular, because of him...

...but I was woken up - I am on vacation at the family's second home in Provence - with an urgent message about matters in Ukraine. For much of the last two years people like me have banged-on, with gentle tedium, about the possibility of an 'Orange-Blue' coalition between (useless) President Yuschenko and the Party of the Regions.

Was it in the last parliamentary elections, or the one before that, where the prevailing wisdom was that such political expediency would never wash with the Ukrainian people?

Well now the Orange Witch (as someone wicked, I forget who... once named her), has entered into the bastardised union of orange and blue. And *very* clever it is too.... A master-stroke! It was clear for the last two years that only through Orange-Blue union could Ukraine become less kindergarten and more grown-up country. But we never expected this coalition. And it is brilliant!

To use President Medvedev's choice phrase (said yesterday, of President Saakashvili of Ukraine), Victor Yuschneko is 'political dead meat'.

Timoshenko - who is as politically promiscuous today as she was..ahem... ideologically promiscuous in her Komsomol days - has for the last 2-3 weeks been rumoured in Kyiv (and I was there each week) to have 'done a deal with Moscow'.

*This*, I think, is the deal:

- A less than excruciating deal on the 2009 price of gas (Moscow's side)

- Death to the idea of NATO or EU membership (Yulia's)

- Moscow's clout and Rinat Akhmetov's money to be withdrawn from Yanukovich - a nicer bloke than you might think, but poor chap can't run a bath let alone a political party fit for government - and put behind Yulia...

- Moscow to have a free hand on the issue of Transnistria; which it shaping up nicely to be the next 'frozen conflict' which Moscow will (a) de-frost and settle (b) in Moscow's favour, (c) while America is too politically weak, and by extension therefore the EU, to do anything about it.

- Yulia to be propelled to being PM in power and in office on a more 'Moscow-friendly' trajectory; rejecting the US/EU encroachment into Ukraine. And thus set up to squish Yuschneko in the Presidential.

Result? A government in Kyiv that can actually govern; Ukraine definitively out of Washington's and Brussel's orbit and - sweetest of all - the second of the most jarring of the Color Revolution Presidents brought low and made powerless, in prelude to their final humiliation and removal.

This summer and Autumn Russia is resplendent and crushing a weak USA and spineless, compromising EU. C'est magnifique et, alors, c'est bien la guerre...