It appears that the Russian demand for Ukraine to pay the market price of gas has destabilised the relatively new government - as was probably intended.

From the article;

OPPOSITION MPs in Ukraine have issued a stinging rebuke to President Viktor Yushchenko by voting to sack his cabinet over last week's deal to end the "gas war" with Russia.

A motion of no confidence on Tuesday was backed by 250 votes to 50 to dismiss the Prime Minister, Yury Yekhanurov, and his cabinet and reappoint them as acting ministers until elections in March.

Many MPs had reacted furiously to the deal with Moscow, under which control of Ukraine's gas imports was handed to a shadowy trading company called RosUkrEnergo, which has refused to reveal who owns half of its shares.

Russia was in a win-win situation either way. It should also be remembered that Indonesia recently removed their oil-subsidies which led to a 90% increase in the price of oil. It survived the bump as all good stable societies and democracies do. Yushchenko has probably sold the will, resilience and democratic demands of the Ukrainian people short. It will be interesting to see if he pays for it in March.

The re-election of Lukashenko in Belarus came with suspected wide-spread fraud stemming from a long early voting period. Russia has continued its devolution into executive autocracy by introducing similar measures.

From Russia Profile on the use of early voting in Belarus ;

Belarussian opposition activists paid special attention to the conduct and volume of early voting, which began five days before Sunday's official election date.

Official figures showed that 31.3 percent of the entire electorate opted to cast their votes ahead of time, over twice the number in the last presidential election, in 2001.

Analysts said that the length of the early voting period made it particularly difficult to monitor for irregularities.

"The extent of early voting alone resulted in unfair elections," said said Tatsiana Pratsko, the president of the Belarussian Helsinki Committee.

"Ballots could easily be forged. Ballot boxes were never properly safeguarded, allowing a high degree of control on the part of the authorities. According to our data, early voting accounted for as much as a half of Lukashenko's final figures. The precincts we monitored closely during the day of the elections showed a much closer breakdown of numbers, with Lukashenko receiving 51 to 52 percent of the vote."

Dictators, autocrats and despots like the appearance of democratic legitimacy. Especially since they have to deal with the dominant west which is predominantly liberal democrat in organisation.

The Duma has adopted similar laws to Lukashenko's for Russia , effectively enabling electoral fraud to ensure the outcome of an election. From Moscow News ;

The election bill, which was passed in the first of the three required readings, widens the criteria for removing parties or individuals from electoral races and allows for early voting -- a procedure Russia had already tried and abandoned, and which critics fear would allow to manipulate election results.

Government's move to consolidate their position as much as they can; and with the apparatus of state being used to the absolute maximum that can be got away with. This is true for Australia too where each electoral law change is an attempt of tilting the electoral game toward incumbent entrenchment and party advantage.

Russia has fallen into the depths of executive autocracy. Banning parties and entrenching electoral fraud through legislation are easier in such an environment.

Stephen Cohen has an article titled; The New Cold War . Cohen argues that the main threat to American security remains Russia and that the American policy approach to Russia since the Cold War is exacerbating that threat.

Cohen points to many statistics of a Russian state in decline since the 1980s. It is under-going depopulation, demodernization and is suffering wartime death and birth rates. Additionally there is little to no public support or confidence in the governmental institutions outside of Vladimir Putin.

Cohen sees Russia as forming a threat to the US through either Balkanisation as the political, economic and ethnic divisions result in further disintegration of what was once the Soviet Empire.

The other possibility he mentions is the increasingly autocratic government and oligarchic economy enabling virulent authoritarianism and nationalism. Regimes of this nature tend to spread disruption to their international neighbours.

Cohen identifies two policies toward a fragile Russia which Washington has undertaken;

one decorative and outwardly reassuring, the other real and exceedingly reckless. The decorative policy, which has been taken at face value in the United States, at least until recently, professes to have replaced America's previous cold war intentions with a generous relationship of "strategic partnership and friendship."

...

The real US policy has been very different - a relentless, winner-take-all exploitation of Russia's post-1991 weakness. Accompanied by broken American promises, condescending lectures and demands for unilateral concessions, it has been even more aggressive and uncompromising than was Washington's approach to Soviet Communist Russia.

The latter policy is the encirclement of Russia with American bases in parts of the old Soviet states such as Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Cohen argues that this doctrine entails that Russia has no legitimate interests outside of its own sovereign territory. He also argues that America has interfered in Russian internal affairs as well, basically not treating it with the fearful respect that it did during the Cold War.

This has lead to a 'chill' in Russian-American relations;

The extraordinarily anti-Russian nature of these policies casts serious doubt on two American official and media axioms: that the recent "chill" in US-Russian relations has been caused by Putin's behaviour at home and abroad, and that the cold war ended fifteen years ago.

The first axiom is false, the second only half true: The cold war ended in Moscow, but not in Washington, as is clear from a brief look back.

Cohen links this behaviour to the triumphalism of the ending of the Cold War which was claimed as an American victory, rather than a Soviet-American mutual decision to end the conflict.

One was to treat post-Communist Russia as a defeated nation that was expected to replicate America's domestic practices and bow to its foreign policies.

...

From that triumphalism grew the still-ongoing interventions in Moscow's internal affairs and the abiding notion that Russia has no autonomous rights at home or abroad.

Russia still has a veto on the United Nations, but neo-conservatism has done an end-run around multi-national institutions as the United States seeks to restate its right for national sovereignty and international hegemony.

In reality, Russia is being treated little differently to other nations under the neo-conservatist foreign policy doctrines coming from the White House.

Cohen's claim that this is not new to the Bush Administration is true, but the Clinton White House had similar views on US hegemony and the on-going reach of its military. In terms of rhetoric and behaviour surrounding that doctrine, Clinton was less abrasive internationally than Bush II has been.

The Cold War was an economic one that centred on social and economic organisation. The Soviet's did lose that competition. Liberal democracy and a market economy were better able to provide prosperity to its people.

Additionally those forms of organisation were better able to provide political stability to its institutions, effectively minimising the destructive effects of corruption and arbitrary government.

Communism, as practiced by the Soviets could not compete and collapsed under its own weight.

Autocracy and oligarchy are not much better than the prior Soviet political and economic organisation. The west is right to point this out to Russia. Even though the west is going through its own collapse into executive decree in the Washington and Westminster systems, there are enough checks and balances that executive decree is hitting barriers.

The spread and reach of American military has meant that any nation which is an American ally has an American base on its territory. Australia has two for instance.

It is only really Russia, China and Iran who do not now; and even they are surrounded by fixed bases and American blue-water projection from its carrier groups.

American policy has been destructive in the past, the action in Iraq has had a destabilising effect on the region, as well as oil markets. Russia again is no different in this respect. America plays power politics hard and spares the whip for no nation - not even a longtime lapdog ally like Australia.

This is effectively the world-order that Russia, like other nations, has to exist in.

So what should Russia's policy be?

Putin has been building new sympathetic states to the Kremlin between Russia and EU/NATO; such as Belarus and a failed attempt at the Ukraine.

This will fail, the best means to capture the world's attention is to build a thriving internal economy. Do that and every nation will want to be Russia's friend.

China has discovered that despite being a one-party state, the west wants a part of the new Chinese prosperity.

Russia has enough people that even if it maxes out in GDP per-capita, it will be one of the world's biggest economies. This, coupled with Russia's existing military power and entrenched status in multi-national institutions from its Soviet days, will ensure that America and other nations wont be able to push too hard against Russia.

Russia doesn't have to Americanize to achieve this; but it will have to adopt more liberal political and economic policies, and this is where Russia has failed.

Cohen has a point that American policy toward Russia should be more aware that Russia could be at a tipping point internally where it adopts a path that can lead to greater international disruption.

But it is naive to think that American policy will change to allow a 'Russian exception'. Power politics is selfish and focused on internal advantage.

The only exception America will follow is American exceptionalism. It stands that other nations need to put themselves in a position of strength in this environment and the path Russia has taken under Putin does not achieve this.

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An excellent article on how Putin is melding the state and economy with former KGB agents as the glue . It is a very dangerous form of patronage.

From the article:

"If in the Soviet period and the first post-Soviet period, the KGB and FSB [people] were mainly involved in security issues, now half are still involved in security but the other half are involved in business, political parties, NGOs, regional governments, even culture," said Olga Kryshtanovskaya, director of the Moscow-based Center for the Study of Elites. "They started to use all political institutions."

Kryshtanovskaya recently analyzed the official biographies of 1,016 leading political figures -- departmental heads of the presidential administration, all members of the government, all deputies of both houses of parliament, the heads of federal units and the heads of regional executive and legislative branches. She found that 26 percent had reported serving in the KGB or its successor agencies.

A more microscopic look at the biographies, she said -- examining unexplained gaps in résumés, unlikely career paths or service in organizations affiliated with the KGB -- suggests the startling figure of 78 percent.

Perry Anderson has a long survey of Russia's recent political history and future form, touching on some interesting factual and theoretical ground.

Anderson refers to the current shape of the Russian polity as a Managed Democracy, where elections are held but the outcome is predetermined, and power is held by a contiguous elite with little institutional input from non-elites. It would seem to have a broader application than Russia - Pakistan comes to mind. Anderson points out that the foundation of this regime was established under supposed democrat and reformer Yeltsin:

Far from the demise of the USSR reducing the number of Russian functionaries, the bureaucracy had - few post-Communist facts are more arresting - actually doubled in size by the end of Yeltsin's stewardship, to some 1.3 million. Not only that. At the topmost levels of the regime, the proportion of officials drawn from the security services or armed forces soared above their modest quotas under the late CPSU: composing a mere 5 per cent under Gorbachev, it has been calculated that they occupied no less than 47 per cent of the highest posts under Yeltsin.

Later in the article, there's an echo of Peter Turchin and Ibn Khaldun in a cyclic analysis of the state:

If the second phase in the cycle of managed democracy is now coming to an end in Russia, what of the third and fourth phases, comparable to the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods under Communism? The whole cycle, Furman replies, will be much shorter - not seventy, but about thirty years. We are probably at midpoint right now. As for the future: the Russian intelligentsia was briefly in power in 1991, but its ideology was primitive and its outlook naive. So when the democracy it wanted was discarded by Yeltsin, the defeat of democracy was the defeat of this intelligentsia too. Only when Russian intellectuals have produced a self-critical assessment of this experience will it be able to develop new and sounder ideals for the future.

Furman was a historian of ancient religions for many years before turning his eye to modern Russia, which may account for his fondness for cycles.

Sociologist Georgi Derlugian also makes a telling observation about Russia's imperial past.

Capitalism in the globalisation mode is antithetical to the mercantilist bureaucratic empires that specialised in maximising military might and geopolitical throw-weight - the very pursuits in which Russian and Soviet rulers were enmeshed for centuries.

As Anderson repeatedly implies, managed democracy may turn out to be a stable political system, at least on timescales of a century or so, which is the sort of timescale states have to treat as thick reality. Liberal democracy, though more desirable, is not inevitable.

Inherent in that assumption is the loss of American power. Russia and Iran are able to conduct their foreign policy in the manner they are because Iraq and Afghanistan have sapped American standing and power. Russia's adoption of the organization of nationalistic authoritarianism will place it in direct opposition to American interests. While I doubt it will be the binary globe of the Cold War - which will be the intellectually lazy manner in which to approach it - Russia and China will both challenge America as the sole hyper-power.

William Kristol writes that the United States cannot turn away from a pro-Democratic government and nation. This is consistent with Irving Kristol's description of neo-conservative foreign policy:

Barring extraordinary events, the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from nondemocratic forces, external or internal.

It appears that John McCain has adopted the same policy, with the twist that Christian nations must be defended - supposedly from authoritarian atheist hordes? - in order to save 'the friend' from 'the enemy'. In this manner McCain's foreign policy is neo-conservative and a continuation of Bush's foreign policy. However as Gregory Djerejain writes:

Look, all of this would have been stupid and deeply flawed policy, but at least morally defensible, if we meant to actually defend the Georgians. But we don't, and never will, as this would mean a war with Russia.

Consequently any solution to this war will be diplomatic and not involve military force. Currently this conflict will continue for as long as the Russians say it will. The United States is in a politically weak position and Putin knows it.