In many ways, the images  from Kiev are reminiscent of Prague in 1968, Gdansk in 1980 and Leipzig in 1989 -- when, for example, tens of thousands of protesters march through the dark streets of Kiev, shouting angry slogans against the current regime; when they stick red chrysanthemums through the holes along the upper edge of the shields held by police officers standing guard in front of the presidential administration building; or when Lech Walesa suddenly appears, as if time had stood still.

At 1:36 p.m. on Thursday, the Polish Nobel Peace Prize laureate steps onto the stage on Kiev's Independence Square and calls out: "Long live the Ukraine." The speakers preceding and following him include former world champion boxer Vladimir Klitschko, Ruslana Luzychko, the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest who is currently on a hunger strike, and Patriarch Filaret, the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, wearing his bishop's crown, leading an entire band of priests in full regalia. There are also uniformed police officers who have decided to join forces with the protesters.

It was an exciting week in Kiev. The Pope sent his greetings from the Vatican, the country's top rock musicians provided entertainment to protesters standing in a freezing snowstorm, and, in keeping with the nature of the Ukrainians, things have been more peaceful than aggressive. A lot is at stake. The Ukraine has experienced a silent coup, and its outcome is still uncertain.

Contrary to expectations, Viktor Yushchenko, 50, the West's favorite in the presidential election, was just three percent behind Viktor Yanukovich in the country's runoff election on November 21. Yanukovich, 54, a powerfully built man from the Russian-speaking Donetsk coal-mining region, is favored by current President Leonid Kuchma and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

After the results were announced, the Committee of Ukrainian Voters claimed there were three million bogus votes. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has called into question the legitimacy of the vote. There is talk of "dead souls" on the voter rolls, magic ink that supposedly makes votes for the opposition candidate invisible and massive bussing operations on the day of the election. Critics claim that voters holding registration cards valid in locations far from their home towns voted more than once in various places throughout the country.

Peaceful protests

The protest demonstrations began on a Monday. Most of the people streaming onto the streets are young people, university students, high-school students and trainees. Downtown Kiev has been drowned in a sea of orange, the color of the opposition party. There are orange scarves, flags, and streamers. "A shame," they yell, repeating the name "Yushchenko" over and over. They survive on tea and borscht and donated sandwiches. A beer in a neighborhood restaurant costs as much as a worker makes in a day.

Yushchenko, bearing the scars of what is presumed to have been an attempted poisoning in September, stands at the front of the stage. He has announced that he is the rightful winner of the election. Standing next to him, her hair telegenically braided and wrapped around her head, is the former deputy prime minister, Julia Timoshenko. She's calling for a general strike, a march on government buildings and for shutting down streets and railroad lines.

These are scenes of civil disobedience, reminiscent of Belgrade in 2000, when dictator Slobodan Milosevic was toppled, and the Georgian capital of Tiflis, exactly one year ago, when President Eduard Shevardnadze was driven from office  by peaceful demonstrations, also in the wake of a rigged election.

The people who participated and helped pay for those efforts are also in Kiev. The flags of the "Pora" ("It's time") movement flap in the breeze. "Pora" has set up a hotline and is partly responsible for setting up the tent city in downtown Kiev. The money of George Soros, market speculator, multimillionaire and sponsor of Eastern European liberation movements, has also found its way into the Ukraine.

A European "unknown"

There is one significant difference between these demonstrations and those that took place in Tiflis and Belgrade: At stake in Kiev is the future of Europe's largest country in terms of area. Ukraine is a post-Soviet-era giant that had previously attracted little interest from political Europe, a country with an area of more than 230,000 square miles and a population of 47.4 million.

Ukraine is all kinds of things. It's the Austrian Baroque architecture of Lvov, the coal mines and steel plants of the Don basin, the tourist paradise of Black Sea beaches in Crimea. It's cave monasteries from the time of ancient Rus, when Kiev was the capital of the Russian empire, and it's traces of centuries of foreign domination by Mongols, Poles, Lithuanians and Russians. Ukraine "is your European unknown," says author Andrzej Stasiuk to those Westerners who aren't sure how they should classify the country.

Perhaps this is precisely the reason why the current battle for the country's future is being waged so vehemently. "There could be a new East-West conflict," says Moscow political scientist Sergey Markov, who has close ties to the Kremlin, and he believes that Ukraine is only a stage for this brewing conflict. Markov should know. He's part of the team manning the trenches in Ukraine.

Months ago, he and other key Kremlin operatives set up a sort of headquarters in a building on Kiev's grand Khreshchatik Boulevard called Ukraine House, which once housed the Lenin Museum. This is where the effort to do everything possible to install the candidate of the powerful was managed.

Russian President Vladimir Putin spared no expense to guaranty Moscow's continuing influence in its largest neighboring state, with the help of Yanukovich. He greeted and kissed the candidate in front of cameras in Moscow. And just before the election, he traveled to Kiev to publicly lend his support to Moscow's candidate.

In his second term, Putin seems to have thrown diplomatic caution to the winds, as he recently demonstrated in declaring his support for George W. Bush in the US presidential election. He was the first to send his congratulations after the Ukrainian runoff election, even before all votes had been counted, just ahead of Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian leader of Belarus, and Igor Smirnov, former dictator of the Moldovan Transnistrian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Dueling election observers

Shortly before the Ukrainian Supreme Court announced last Thursday that the opposition party's complaints would have to be reviewed before an official, final result could be announced, Putin issued yet another round of congratulatory statements, saying that the Ukrainians, in electing Yanukovich, had opted for "stability, strengthening of the state and further development of democratic reforms."

Naturally, official Russian election observers certified the elections as having been above reproach. But they weren't the only ones. After the election, Robert Carr, a former Democratic US Congressmen who served in office for 18 years, said: "We were impressed by the professionalism of all election officials with whom we had contact."

Carr heads up a delegation of prominent former members of Congress and Washington lobbyists staying in the four-star Dnipro Hotel. Many Ukrainians are outraged when they discover that the US observers were essentially bought by US-Ukrainian businessman Alexey Kisselyov, for a fee of $500 a day.

In the "war of election observers" currently raging in Kiev, however, the hired US friends of the established Ukrainian regime are getting the short end of the stick. In the end, Republican Senator Richard Lugar, President George W. Bush's personal representative, concluded that there was a "concerted and energetic program of fraud and abuse on the day of the election."

Political scientist Markov, the Kremlin's man on the scene, calls the major powers' unconcealed intervention in the course of events in strategically important states "modern foreign policy." Putin's ambassador to the Ukraine -- former prime minister and head of Russian energy giant Gazprom Viktor Chernomyrdin -- was already complaining in March about the "US taskforce" in the country.

While the major powers seem to understand what is currently at stake in the Ukraine, the European Union is still searching for a strategy. Two years ago, former EU Commission president Romano Prodi clarified his vision of the future of the European heartland, likening Ukraine's chances of becoming an EU member with those of New Zealand. According to Prodi, the EU will be closing its door to new members after Turkey and the Balkan countries join the alliance. However, Prodi did concede that there might be room in the EU's "ring of friends" for the Ukraine, as well as Morocco and Moldova.

Ever since the EU's borders were extended to neighboring Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, Ukraine's window to the West has only been open those who can afford to get a visa. Conversely, the volume of visitors to the country has been light, with no major European politicians traveling to Kiev during the first days. Claudia Nolte, the former German Minister for Youth and Family Affairs, arriving from Berlin and represented on the stage, recalls the peaceful revolution in her own country, the former East Germany, and warns: "I think the West has paid too little attention to the Ukraine."

A deeply divided country

Last week, both Americans and Russians expressed their concerns about the territorial future of the Ukraine, after the East/West contrast within the country became all too clear once again at the polls. On a map showing the distribution of votes, Ukraine is divided into a bright orange western and central section -- Yushchenko territory in which he garnered up to 90 percent of votes -- and the equally unilaterally blue eastern section and Crimean Peninsula, with blue representing the color of Yanukovich supporters' strongholds.

Sergey Karaganov, a Moscow-based foreign policy expert with close ties to the Kremlin, warns that "the deep division within the Ukraine" could "jeopardize its existence as a country." And Charles Kupchan, a former member of the US National Security Council, points to the nightmare of Yugoslavia. It is possible that Ukraine will succumb to an increasingly bitter dispute over political identity, language and culture between Europe-leaning western Ukrainians, only part of the country since 1945, and their Russian-speaking fellow Ukrainians in the eastern industrial and coal-mining regions.

For months, the Yushchenko team has been talking down the "myth" of a country split in two, knowing full well that the Kuchma regime itself has repeatedly tried to play off the East against the West.

The truth is that ever since Ukraine, dominated for centuries by Muscovites and known to Russians as "Little Russia," was granted independence following the attempted coup in Moscow in 1991 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, almost all of the four presidential elections held to date has illustrated the absence of a unifying national concept.

The first election, in December 1991, was won by farmer's son Leonid Kravchuk, a native speaker of Ukrainian from the Lvov region. Although Kravchuk once held the post of secretary of ideology in Kiev's Communist Party leadership, he confidently promoted the country's autonomy. As a result, he seemed just as electable to the country's Russians as to its western-leaning population in the Lvov region. However, the country's economy faltered and its export revenues were insufficient to pay for its growing debts for Russian oil and natural gas deliveries -- a circumstance Moscow used as a means of exerting political pressure. In 1994, Kravchuk was voted out of office and Leonid Kuchma came to power -- as a lifesaver in a time of national emergency.

From his palace in Kiev, Kuchma, a heavy-drinking former autocratic chief executive of a weapons manufacturing company who speaks Ukrainian only moderately well, has taken the country on a course alternating between East and West during the past 10 years. He agreed to give up Ukraine's approximately 1,600 nuclear warheads, accepted American economic aid and joined the NATO Partnership for Peace. Later on, he concluded a treaty of friendship with Moscow. On the domestic front, plans to privatize state-owned companies faltered and the president, bypassing a parliament that seemed incapable of getting any work done, ruled by decree.

Following his re-election in 1999, Kuchma began expanding his personal powers. He demanded additional authority from parliament. Instead of strengthening a system of multi-party democracy, he allowed policy to be determined by a handful of oligarchic groups, whose members included steel and pipeline magnate Viktor Pinchuk, Kuchma's son-in-law, and Grigorij Surkis, media czar and owner of Kiev's Dynamo soccer team.

After some hesitation, Kuchma dispatched his prime minister, Viktor Yanukovich, to run in the 2004 election. Yanukovich, an auto mechanic and former governor of the coal-producing province of Donetsk, comes with two previous convictions for robbery and bodily injury, as well as a reputation of being a man of the status quo. During the campaign, he announced his intention to change the country's course, away from the NATO partnership and toward closer ties with Russia.

One thing that Kuchma and his candidate did not expect is that challenger Yushchenko, despite being part of a relatively poorly organized opposition, has been able to garner broad support from the population. Yushchenko, a banker by trade and a father of five, has a good reputation within Ukraine's collective memory. As prime minister, he began pushing for reforms in 1999 and paying back wages. But his move toward privatization angered the political parties, which maintained close ties to the oligarchs who ran the economy, and he was removed after 16 months.

His current campaign program reveals the hope that no promise can be too big for voters to find unbelievable: five million new jobs, pension increases, payment of outstanding salaries, combating corruption ("fire those who are corruptible and hire honorable professionals"). Nothing seems impossible. Yushchenko promises a "life in a completely different country, a country whose top priority is its people."

The heroic Yushchenko, who comes across as somewhat wooden, has his reputation of honesty as his greatest asset. And that's a great deal, say demonstrators resting in the deep snow beneath the golden domes of Kiev's St. Michael Monastery. And his reputation is only reinforced by the fact that he and his wife, Julia Timoshenko, have been persecuted for years with accusations of unjustified enrichment.

The attractive Julia Timoshenko is a perfectly telegenic candidate for prime time TV, and she's also capable of speaking well and arguing her case, both valuable traits in Kiev these days. And as far as choreography, style and enthusiasm goes, the orange-clad members of the opposition clearly have the upper hand over Yanukovich's blue-clad supporters. They have fashionable women in their ranks, plenty of humor, and don't wear much in the way of Soviet clothing anymore. They have also mastered the art of turning a serious political cause into something akin to a happening.

Some things have gone wrong so far, but that's unavoidable. Lech Walesa announced that he was the OSCE's representative, but the OSCE didn't know anything about it. Vladimir Klitschko, who had previously complained, on behalf of all Ukrainians, about the "Polish-Lithuanian enslavement of the past," is now overjoyed that Poland, with Walesa and President Aleksander Kwasniewski, and Lithuania, with President Valdas Adamkus, are now leading supporters of the opposition movement.