Russia Examines Where It Went Wrong in Ukraine

There are many ways history may judge last month’s presidential elections in Ukraine, but in Russia these days the reverberations are most often described with a single word, the same in Russian as it is in English: “fiasco.”

Stunned by the evaporation of a victory they thought would be easy, stuck with a candidate they now claim was foisted on them, Kremlin campaign strategists for several days have been trying to explain what led to one of the greatest miscalculations of Russian diplomacy since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin risked his reputation, influence and good graces with the Bush administration in trying to win the election for Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich. Moscow apparently believed his victory was crucial to retaining a foothold in a nation that many view almost as part of the Russian motherland, one that opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko seeks to move closer to the West.

Now, with the election overturned after allegations of vote-rigging and Yanukovich facing an uphill rematch against Yushchenko, Russia faces international condemnation and the prospect of a European-style democracy on its doorstep, but it has no apparent strategy for emerging from the quagmire.

“Now, there is no question about it: The Russian presidential administration has suffered a fiasco in Ukraine, and the problem it is confronted with -- namely, the problem of saving its face -- is a major one,” said Marat Gelman, a veteran Moscow campaign strategist who also advised the Ukrainian government during the campaign.

At least for the moment, Russia’s hope of establishing a sphere of influence across the frontiers of the former Soviet Union has foundered, beaten by mass demonstrations by Yushchenko’s supporters and by the Kremlin’s attempts to manipulate a neighbor’s political future.

“Russia has utterly lost its game and can no longer impose anything on Ukraine. Russia’s strategic policy towards Ukraine has suffered a shattering fiasco. It is a colossal setback of Putin’s policies,” said Stanislav Belkovsky, a Moscow analyst who is thought to be close to Russian security agencies.

An independent military analyst, Pavel Felgenhauer, said, “Putin is mad. He feels himself vulnerable and cheated, surrounded by enemies.”

Armed with hindsight, pro-Kremlin political strategists this week were blaming the wealthy Ukrainian business figures who sold Moscow on Yanukovich, whose criminal record, they said, drained votes.

More than that, they were crediting the United States and Europe for outmaneuvering Russia. Kremlin tacticians believe that while they were trying to secure Yanukovich’s victory, Yushchenko’s supporters were a step ahead of them, organizing the street uprising that followed the election.

“Yanukovich was not Russia’s choice. He was the choice of the Ukrainian business elite. Russia supported him as an alternative to Yushchenko,” said Sergei A. Markov, part of a team of Moscow political strategists hired to promote what was known as “the Kremlin Project” in Ukraine.

In the end, the two jail terms Yanukovich served in his youth for theft and assault, though expunged from his record, were a strong negative for many voters, Markov said.

“The Ukrainian business elite [lacks respect for] their own people to such a degree that they were bold enough to try and impose on them as president a man who had a record of two prison terms,” Markov said in an interview.

Gleb Pavlovsky, a strategist on the Kremlin team, said Russia had left it up to Ukrainians to nominate a successor to President Leonid D. Kuchma. “Russia became focused on the election mechanics but missed the revolution,” he said.

By election time, it was “way too late,” Pavlovsky told Moscow’s Nezavisimaya Gazeta. “The opposition circles weren’t getting ready for elections. They were getting ready to take power in the guise of elections.”

As Kremlin analysts see it, the hundreds of tents and thousands of orange scarves available so quickly to Yushchenko supporters showed that pro-Western groups calculated in advance that it was in the streets, not at the polls, that the contest would be decided.

Putin, apparently on the advice of the Ukrainian oligarchs, threw his entire weight behind Yanukovich, traveling twice to Ukraine in ill-disguised attempts to campaign for him and congratulating him before he was even declared the winner.

Russian analysts close to the Kremlin say now that Kuchma was smarter. Although he made it clear that Yanukovich was his choice, he avoided any strong public endorsements. “Kuchma drew Putin into this game in the fullest possible measure, but at the same time, Kuchma

“It is almost sure that we have lost the confidence of the people of Ukraine, and this is Russia’s major loss, really.”

In the ensuing crisis, both the U.S. and Russia have traded accusations of meddling.

“It’s indisputable that the Russians have made some serious miscalculations: openly supporting a candidate, actively intervening in the election process and, in the process, putting the prestige of the country and of the political leadership on the line,” a senior U.S. diplomat said Wednesday.

“We’re disappointed that the Russians’ immediate reaction has been to view this as an East-West dispute and fall prey to all sorts of conspiracy theories, rather than addressing the real problem, and the body of evidence of fraud and falsification in the election itself,” he said.

The Russian strategy apparently was engineered by a small circle within the Kremlin that bypassed the professional diplomats at the Foreign Ministry, analysts said. The process reflects what many say is Putin’s growing reliance on a small cluster of advisors, most of whom, like him, are former KGB agents.

“Russia’s foreign policy would have been much smarter and much more successful had it been a result of broader discussions, broader debates.... And this is the Achilles’ heel of Russia’s foreign policy,” said Dmitry Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.

In the meantime, low-key contacts between the Kremlin and Yushchenko are underway, though “we are not trying to rush the process,” Kremlin strategist Pavlovsky said in an interview.

Russia, he said, was seeking assurances on issues of concern to Yanukovich supporters, especially those in eastern Ukraine near the Russian border.

These include guarantees that Yanukovich supporters in western Ukraine would not be “purged,” and that the Russian language would be preserved, he said.

“If this package of agreements is not implemented, there can be no firm authority in Ukraine,” Pavlovsky added. “And an opposition attempt to simply seize control over eastern parts of Ukraine by force will be rebuffed. This is something we can say for sure.”

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Times staff writer Sergei L. Loiko and Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.