I don't think it is necessarily a question of Russian bad influence that's going to lead to fraud in an election. Most people already believe that next year's elections will be fraudulent in Ukraine. They've already rigged the draft election law to suit them, and they're going to move from a full proportional to a mixed election system, with 50% elected in proportional and 50% in single mandate districts. That, they hope, will give them 50% to 60% of seats. Currently they're running at 15% popularity, so this is a big jump, which will of course marginalize the opposition.
They're already past masters at undertaking this fraud. One has to remember--and this is something that western policy-makers often have ignored--is that Viktor Yanukovych has never admitted to election fraud in 2004. He believes the Orange Revolution was a CIA operation designed to prevent his coming to power. You might laugh, but that's what he believes. That conspiracy mindset is very deeply Soviet and part of that world. It's the mindset of Vladimir Putin also.
Viktor Yanukovych, as governor, as prime minister, and as president, has overseen four elections since 1999. In all four elections there was election fraud. Free elections are just not part of his culture. You need to have a massive OSCE presence on the ground, as there was in 2004, and you need to spell out the concrete results of election fraud to them, not in the very diplomatic terms that the EU has been using until now, but in concrete terms, including what we talked about: potential visa blacklists.
As the EU ambassador to Ukraine says, if elections are fraudulent, then the window closes. Ukraine will then be perceived as a second Belarus and Viktor Yanukovych as a second Lukashenko. That will be the impact of fraudulent elections next year.
We can also expect, if the elections are fraudulent, that this would lead to potential protests and potential street violence. We have a very different scenario from 2004. When a president is leaving office, as in 2004, he's not likely to want to use violence to prevent the Orange Revolution from taking place because he doesn't want to leave office with blood on his hands, but these guys are not planning to leave office. They want to maintain office, and for them the most important thing is to ensure a massive parliamentary majority next year so that he can be re-elected in 2015.