Carl Bildt, William Hague, Karel Schwarzenberg, Radoslaw Sikorski, and Guido Westerwelle — the Foreign Ministers of Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Germany, respectively — took to the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times on March 4 to denounce another nation for putting its former Prime Minister on trial for failing to perform state duties correctly, for costing the country untold millions if not billions of dollars, and failing to properly safeguard the economic well-being of the state. The government trying the former Prime Minister is made up of the latter’s political rivals.

They are not protesting the trial of Iceland’s former Prime Minister, Geir Haarde, who faces criminal charges for failing to anticipate the second-worst financial crisis to strike the world in the last hundred years (and the worst to hit Iceland in its history). Haarde’s trial has been undertaken at the behest of one of his former ministers, a political opponent now tied to his party’s archrival.

Instead, they are protesting Ukraine’s conviction of its former Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko. The charge against Tymoshenko can be boiled down to making a deal with Russia that inflated the cost of natural gas well beyond market levels, costing Ukraine enormous sums of money and placing it in an economic hole that, with the global downturn of 2008-2009, has left the country in a hole from which it has not escaped.

The idea of charging a prime minister with the crime of being bad at his job is alien to us (and to most of those foreign ministers’ nations as well), especially as both Haarde’s party and Tymoshenko were roundly defeated at the following, fair elections in their countries. Nevertheless, these similar laws are the laws of those lands, making the charge of political prosecution somewhat silly.

In vain have I searched for some evidence that these foreign ministers are protesting Haarde’s prosecution (or Tymoshenko’s prosecution of Ukraine’s current President, Viktor Yanukovych, after her coalition defeated him in the Orange Revolution, on charges past the statute of limitations). It is with equal futility with which I scan the Op-Ed for some sign that Ukraine is considering repealing the law under which Tymoshenko was convicted, and that Yanukovych has stated he would be ready to pardon her on that repeal.

Any reasonable person wants Ukraine to further liberalize, to engage in more democratic reforms, and to continue on the path set first by the Orange Revolution and now continued in Yanukovych’s election and pension reforms. Kiev would be the first to admit that they have a long road ahead of them, but they have set themselves — as those foreign ministers acknowledge — on the hard road of reform, toward Europe, and away from their traditional hegemon, Russia.

The cost of those reforms and that strategic positioning has not been small. Russia’s tendency to treat Ukraine as a vassal state — for reasons historical and geopolitical — is not lightly thwarted, and Russia has responded by increasing the political and economic pressure on Ukraine, especially through the natural gas on which Ukraine relies for survival.

One of the unnoticed aspects of Ukraine’s current political situation is that Vladimir Putin has been one of Tymoshenko’s staunchest backers, as she had become one of his in Ukraine; Yanukovych, once a darling in Moscow, has repeatedly rebuffed Russia for the chance to drive his nation closer to the European Union.

Yet with this precarious balance — currently tilted in Europe’s favor — and those same electoral reforms, some of the EU’s foremost foreign ministers take to some of the most valuable journalistic real estate in the world to remonstrate Ukraine for the very sins they implicitly forgive from Iceland.

This is a very dangerous and ill-advised game, something these men and their counterpart at the State Department should know. Ukraine’s easiest route now would be to turn back toward Russia, especially with the European Union flouting its overtures at every turn. Democracy and free markets are wonderful things, but when your citizens face freezing to death, they tend to look small and petty. Every former Soviet Republic observed the West doing nothing as Russia invaded and carved up Georgia, and Ukraine knows it will get no significant help if the Russians turn their attention West.

Sometimes, the carrot is a better incentive than the stick. Even with the we’ll-wait-and-see suggestion at the end of the Op-Ed, the foreign ministers are informing Kyiv that it will never come closer to Europe if it does not fall in line.

Europe and the U.S. have a vested interest in a Ukraine pointed West, not East. Now is the time to offer rewards for good behavior, not threats over bad. Encouraging Kyiv to follow its current course carries much less danger than putting it between a dismissive Europe and a menacing Russia.

Engagement would be far more effective as a policy than such articles by Mr. Bildt and friends.

Matthew Lina is a Junior Scholar at the Center for the Study of Former Soviet Socialist Republics, a thinktank dedicated to promoting democracy and free markets in the former Eastern Bloc. He operates out of Kyiv, London, and the United States, and currently heads a software development company and charitable institutions specializing in promoting civil society in the wreckage of communism.

The entire world is always going to Hell.

There’s always a crisis, always an epoch-shattering catastrophe in the offing. There’s usually a potential genocide, frequently a flashpoint in danger of becoming a shooting war, and invariably the fall of a friendly or unfriendly regime that will have immediate effects and more subtle, far-reaching ones. There is nothing new under the sun.

But there’s very rarely an opening there for the taking, begging to be taken, that can make so many differences. It takes a very special breed of fool to keep turning it down, time and again.

Most of this generation’s world leaders are specially-bred fools.

As I’ve noted before, the signal features of this generation of leaders in the West are a profound belief in their own understanding of Realpolitik, and a simultaneous failure to apply that policy in any effective way. While there are opportunities to be had the world over, it is in Eastern Europe that some of the greatest openings lie.

With Europe’s economies and governments in hibernation or a downward spiral, with a culture of entitlement burning down a culture of interdependent unity, with former Soviet states trying to escape the orbit of a revanchist Russia determined to control Europe through virtual control over natural gas, drawing former Soviet slave states into the European Union should be the first and foremost project Washington and Brussels have for the continent.

Ukraine would like to be part of that world. Despite not-so-subtle recent threats and cuts in gas supplies from Russia, despite repeated signs of contempt from the U.S. and E.U., Ukraine continues its bid for closer ties and future membership in Europe. Its leadership has clearly cast its lot with the West, even if the West has not properly understood this.

While Ukraine has flirted with Russia in the past — most recently during former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s attempts at foreign policy — its current President, Viktor Yanukovych, has not deviated from a Westward course during his time in office. While he has made this extremely explicit in his policy and speeches to date, his most recent speech to the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament, is worth noting for the manner in which he continues to explicitly tie Ukraine’s future to the European Union.

“Our path to the EU has no alternatives,” he told Parliament. “I count on lawmakers’ serious and productive legislative work to support the process of our integration.”

Furthermore, he called for a decreased regulatory hand on business development, and chose very particular language in doing so. The President of Ukraine declared that “obsolete Soviet-era repressive rules of law governing the state-citizen and state-business relations must be finally cancelled.”

That’s right. The President of Ukraine said that, after committing himself to closer ties with the European Union.

While we take it for granted that the word “Soviet” is a synonym for almost every negative adjective in English, it is rare to see the leader of a former Soviet Socialist Republic making this tie so explicitly. It is especially important because in an era in which a wounded-but-returning Vladimir Putin stakes his personal appeal on a neo-Soviet Russian Empire reborn, and Russia’s foreign policy is explicitly aimed at broadening Russian hegemony in effect if not in name, this sort of language is something the foreign policy elite in Washington should take note of.

It is also more than symbolism. Ukraine’s governance has been uneven since before the Orange Revolution, but the last year has seen real improvements: Election reforms tailor-made for approval by the European Union, pension reforms, infrastructure investment for modernization, and now across-the-board economic reforms designed to liberate the economy from the weight of the crushing regulatory state.

This is a rare moment. By welcoming further Ukrainian integration into Europe, Washington and Brussels would send a message to the other states of the former Soviet Union still caught in Russia’s orbit: There is a welcoming future for you with the West. Markets and peoples could be pulled from Russia’s grasp forever with minimal effort. A Russia determined to dominate Europe through territory, people, and natural gas, would be stymied.

This is the cold, logical, Realpolitik choice.

Instead, as has become customary, these cool-eyed, gritty foreign policy types who don’t believe in idealism are dashing this opportunity because they are upset that Tymoshenko is in jail. They may not realize that a look into Tymoshenko’s recent past shows that she was as much a part of the problem in Ukraine as part of any solution.

Regardless of the merits of the Tymoshenko trial (and her proclivity to make even medical exams into a propaganda moment), or the fact that she is actually Putin’s closest ally in Ukraine, we are witnessing the spectacle of some European leaders tanking their own futures over an idealism they angrily reject.

Rational people might wonder why former Soviet states would want to join this gaggle of lunatics, but they do. The question now is whether the lunatics in Brussels come to their senses enough to have them.

Matthew Lina is a Junior Scholar at the soon-to-be-launched Center for the Study of Former Soviet Socialist Republics, a think-tank dedicated to advancing free markets and democracy in the former Soviet bloc. Follow him on Twitter at @MattLinaCXSSR.

When the epitaph of the Obama administration is written, it could well be “He was a former Senator who understood neither the House nor the Senate, and suffered for it.”

Most of President Obama’s failures come from this critical shortcoming. Even those things Obama claims as victories (Obamacare being the best example), and that now threaten to end his presidency, come from misunderstanding the branch of which he was nominally a part for four years. A man who ran as the smartest fellow in the room, with technocratic experience gleaned from years of being a legislator, appears clueless when dealing with Congress. (Jay Cost produced an incredible archive on this very topic here.)

With healthcare, he never understood that if he did not guide Congress, he would get what that branch’s majority wanted, and they gave it to him in spades, leaving him to defend it and unable to blame Republicans for it. The same problem ran with the stimulus, which was after all just a series of payoffs to unions private and public, and which famously failed to keep unemployment below the dreaded no-stimulus curve.

The Obama Presidency in a nutshell. (h/t Dan Spencer at Examiner.com)

With the spectacular wipeout the President and his allies managed in 2010, Obama finally had an excuse for his complete inability to work with the other political branch: Republican intransigence! Can’t get another (sure to fail) stimulus through? Republicans! Need to spend (much much much) more and have a debt ceiling problem? Republicans! Recovery is going too slowly, too much regulation? Ha, just kidding, he’d never say that and mean it.

It hasn’t hurt that the Republican Party appears to be led by people who exist purely to look stupid and bullheaded when opposing Obama. But it ignores the fact that Obama can’t even control his own party very well.

You can go back to the stimulus bill and the health care debate, when the White House agenda seemed entirely beholden to whatever Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid (and more importantly, their caucuses) wanted.

But you don’t need to go that far. You can look at Obama’s recent unconstitutional power grab, which probably struck him as great optics for his campaign. If Obama understood Congress at all, he would have asked whether it is a good idea to tell Republicans — who will likely take the majority in the Senate in 2012 — that he will seek to undermine their very branch of government at every opportunity. A President needs Congress to accomplish the big things, and not to stop him from doing the small things. This is doubly true for a second-term President, who has only months before he is a lame duck.

But more importantly, he just told his own party to support him in an election year at the cost of gravely upsetting the people who will set the agenda in 2013. The Senate runs on consent and comity, and he just did as much damage as all the partisanship of the last ten years combined.

This involves foreign policy as well. Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post recently noted, Obama and Senate Democrats have been engaged in a game of one-upmanship of incompetence, as each tries to find a worse way to botch the confirmation of Matthew Bryza as ambassador to Azerbaijan. Bryza, who had the recommendations of dozens of foreign policy eminences and influential non-governmental organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute, was denied a final vote in 2010 because Senators Boxer and Menendez put a hold on him; Senate Democrats were incompetent to push him through anyway; and Obama chose to fight Republicans rather than his own party, making Bryza a recess appointment. That appointment has ended.

No one will ever accuse Babs “Ma’am” Boxer of having more than room-temperature (Celsius) IQ, and Menendez is purely a creature of the New Jersey Democratic machine, with all its weird ethnic bows. Obama, on the other hand, is supposed to understand exactly how important even things that look small can be.

Azerbaijan is an energy-rich former Soviet state with no real love for Russia and a deep desire to put its energy reserves out on the market. It has been a fairly consistent partner of NATO and United States ally in a region — Central Asia — where we need every ally we can get. It is a country still struggling out from under decades of Soviet tyranny. And it is locked in a cold war with Armenia — a strong enough Russian ally that when Russian tanks left South Ossetia, they headed right for Armenia — over the Nagorno-Karabakh, a region Armenia has been trying to wrest from Azerbaijan for two decades. Armenia actually went to war over Nagorno-Karabakh and killed 20,000 Azeris in the period from 1991 to 1994. It now occupies 20% of Azerbaijan’s territory, with backing from Vladimir Putin.

It is over Nagorno-Karabakh that Armenian diaspora groups the world over have gone to war, equating implicitly and explicitly the Azeri attempt to hold its own land against what was undeniably an assault by Armenia to the Turkish genocide of Armenians in the early 20th century. This is what my professors used to call a “false dichotomy.”

The region remains one of the world’s hottest flashpoints, and is an obstacle to normal relations among the countries in the region. For two decades, the OSCE Minsk group — with the U.S., France, and Russia at its head — has worked to resolve the issue, battling against the perception that three countries with large Armenian diasporas will inherently favor Armenia.

Between them, Obama and the Senate Democrats just gave them a very good reason to believe that. Bryza was opposed, as ambassador to Azerbaijan, for being insufficiently sensitive to Armenia. As Hiatt notes, this has the dual effects of removing an ambassador who was working to strengthen the ties between Azeri civil society and government, with long experience in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and telegraphing to Azerbaijan that his replacement will have to have the stamp of approval of its arch-enemy Armenia.

This undercuts almost every American goal and interest in the region in one fell swoop — and it was all avoidable, if only Obama had understood how to control his own party, or how the Senate works.

Obama promised smart diplomacy. Of course, he also promised effective governance. We’ve gotten neither.

The Western political classes of the last fifty years have been, with a few notable exceptions, abject failures. Reagan, Thatcher, Kohl — these are the exception to the rule. Nowhere has this been more on display than in Europe for the last twelve months, as a series of internal and external crises have demonstrated again and again that most of Europe’s leaders are not capable of grasping those critical, even fleeting opportunities that come along once in a generation.

The foremost example of this is the eurozone crisis, which has been on everyone’s radar screen for some time, and which has accelerated into a full-blown cataclysm-in-waiting these last six months. Every “solution” that Europe’s political class cobbles together (usually after long and late-night meetings, with lots of stiff coffee) never solves the underlying problems, it simply puts a band-aid on the slow-rolling catastrophe; the band-aid flies off, and then every last European leader is shocked to discover that the crisis has come back yet again.

Realpolitik (obviously a German concept, and not just because of the horrible traffic-accident quality of its consonant combination) holds that states must be pragmatic and act within the incredibly tight barriers of the real world. Great leaders seize these moments, and even work to bring them about.

Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, and most of the European politicians of their generation imagine that they are masters of Realpolitik, unlike those terrible Bushies and the neocons who sought to change the world. Because they do not have a fine and detailed understanding of their own policy problems and goals, they cannot deal with the world as it really is, and so they charge dutifully on, surprised when problems blow up and opportunities are lost.

Though stunted by his recent electoral losses, Vladimir Putin is driving hard to reconstruct Russia’s Lost Empire, knowing that beyond its creaky military, it still has two great natural resources — population size and fossil fuel — and both limits and possibilities to its foreign policy because of its rapidly shrinking demographics and Europe’s profound inability to control its own destiny. European foreign policy has become a de facto struggle between Europe’s voluntary European Union and Russia’s attempt to recreate an involuntary one: the pre-election Putin idea of a “Eurasian Union” which is essentially the USSR-redux.  This is the real world, and busy with their own eurozone problems, and absent the American leadership that brought so many former Soviet slave states into Europe’s orbit — leadership now lacking — Europe is unable to deal with it.

Two examples will suffice: Poland and Ukraine.

Poland has been an eager participant in the European project, having learned how friendly the Russians can be from the Katyn Massacre through the fall of the Soviet Union. Europe’s response has been to bungle Poland’s entry into the eurozone (and indeed, almost everything about the euro) so badly that Poland’s population is now in revolt against becoming part of this essential element of European identity. Far worse, when the Obama Administration sacrificed Polish and Czech security concerns to advance its foreign policy — long a tradition of the West’s greatest statesmen — by withdrawing the proposed missile defense shield from those countries, the European response was not to rise up in anger and demand that America remember why NATO was created in the first place. It was to breathe an extremely loud of sigh of relief. A critical opportunity to remind Poland that it was part of Europe, and not a re-emerging element of the Russian empire, was lost.

Bungling Poland, and indeed, leaving the Poles to die, is sadly nothing new for the West. It has all too many roots back in the 1940s.

Unhappy with missing old opportunities, Europe has now turned to new: Missing opportunities with Ukraine.

Ukraine is desperate to express its “European identity” (they, too, have some experience with Russian friendliness and warmth).  They have modeled their significant and recently-enacted electoral reform law on Council of Europe norms; they have undertaken economic reforms — unpopular economic reforms — at IMF direction. Ukraine’s leadership has, time and again, made clear that it views its identity as European more than proto-Russian, and has made clear its desire to be part of Europe’s future, time and again.

Ukraine offers a new (and established) market for the European Union with $40 billion of annual trade, an educated populace, a pipeline for natural gas, a valuable agricultural heartland, and the chance to further staunch Putin’s attempt to reconstitute a Russian empire — new and old foreign policy goals for Europe’s constituent states. It is also poised at a unique moment, in which its desire to escape Russia’s orbit and its opportunity to do so is at a high-water mark. Great statesmen would see the opportunity to accomplish a raft of policy goals and leap at it.

Europe’s response has been to tease and then rebuff it.  To criticize it for reforms, real reforms that aren’t quite good enough.  To attack the President of Ukraine for standing back and allowing the judiciary to convict its former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko of violating a law that predates her prosecution by years.

Europe’s response has been to almost waste an historic opportunity. (The American response is to look puzzled and uncertain about what to say.  This is at least a consistent pose by the State Department.) Instead of acting on a chance to show Europe’s ability to aid and integrate former Soviet states — a project with implications along the entire former Eastern Bloc, in the European Union and out — Europe insists on seeing the glass as half-empty, and demanding a full glass.

Instead of seeing the President of Ukraine state that he would not oppose Tymoshenko’s release if the law under which she was convicted is repealed — as it appears it may be — Europe decries a breakdown in the rule of law. Instead of seeing a series of electoral reforms moving in the right direction, Europe sees only those places in which Ukraine has not made all of the reforms demanded.

But this mistakes an imaginary world for the real one. In the real world, Ukraine has approved an electoral reform law worthy of any European Union nation — both the Government and Tymoshenko’s Opposition voted for the law. Ukraine and the European Union have actually completed their negotiations for an historic Association Agreement, and it is ready to be signed.

Billions of euros are at stake in trade terms for the Europeans. Strategic energy partnerships are at stake for the Europeans. Geo-politics are at stake.  But the Germans, those authors of the word Realpolitik, are wishy-washy about the opportunity because Madame Merkel is worried about left-wing critics in her Bundestag.  So we will wait and see when the Ukraine-EU agreement is finally signed, in a month, two months, or a year?

Poland and Ukraine are of a piece inside the wooly world of Eurocrat-driven diplomacy: Subsidized by decades of American military protection, cut off from understanding the harsh realities of a world of powers not looking for just economic but military advantage, mistrustful of popular sovereignty, and caught in a world without economic or political dynamism, Europe’s constituent states have chosen mediocrities for leadership. Those mediocrities have the luxury of demanding the perfect and eschewing the good. They have the luxury of failing and not even knowing they have.

It is a sad day when even China’s in-house propaganda organ Xinhua understands the stakes and Europe’s leaders do not.

The Obama Administration is not without blame here. We have vital interests in the former states of the old Soviet Union, and in a peaceful Europe that trades and pointlessly debates itself into quiescence while it collapses demographically. We should rightly fear a revanchist Russia — an off-and-on enemy long before the Cold War — and we should encourage every former Soviet state state possible to look to Europe over Russia. We should be pounding on that door for all that we are worth.

Instead, we get indecision and drift from the European Union and the State Department.

A rare moment is making the real world, with its real limitations, open to incredible change. Great leaders and great states would leap at this chance to achieve great things. Ukraine’s and Poland’s partnerships with the European Union represent these rare opportunities.

The West is without great leaders today.

Robert Kaplan has made a tidy niche career out of traveling through and documenting places Americans — and sadly American diplomats — continue to see as exotic and mysterious, and to which we consistently apply horrible policy because of those shortcomings. His travelogues of Eastern Europe and the Balkans especially can be summarized, not unfairly, as “Americans don’t understand people for whom history is not the past, but is a ghost living upstairs every day.” If our career foreign service were required to read his books as part of their entry training, our foreign policy would be a hundred times better.

Alas, our foreign policy class is more inclined to the sort of soft-leftism that sneers at the past while constantly looking to a future that will never happen. This is why they do so well with, and share so much in common with, Western Europeans who share the same intellectual and political tendencies; and so badly with everyone else, who do not. In that light, the Obama Administration’s masterful recent handling of China is both a refreshing surprise and a return to form; that is, a welcome change from years of deferential policy, and at the same time completely forgetting that the Chinese still live with the humiliation of the Opium Wars daily.

It’s a pattern that plays out across the globe, and no less so in Eastern Europe. Perversely, in Foggy Bottom, select episodes of history constantly live on, while critical elements of the past slip away like fog. So the Armenians are always under genocide, and never the aggressors in their own war; the Russians are always a revanchist imperial power, and not a dying natural gas giant unable to control its own Siberian border; and the Ukraine a Soviet puppet state, and not a nation struggling fitfully toward a fully functioning democracy.

This is why we end up with the State Department proudly announcing nuclear-control initiatives with Ukraine one week, and condemnations of the country for prosecuting and convicting its former Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, the next. Really, it’s just more of the same.

Understanding Ukraine’s history and Tymoshenko’s would go a good way to stopping this before it starts. Because Tymoshenko is so tied into Ukraine’s recent history, it’s a good idea to get to know her as she is now and was then, to understand her country’s voyage from the crumbling of the Soviet Empire to the present. Fortunately, Matthew Kaminski, writing in the Wall Street Journal, just did that:

Hers is an improbable life. She makes billions overnight in a rough industry. She loses most of it and goes into politics. She falls from grace again, but then leads a democratic revolution. She becomes a powerful prime minister and dreams of the top job. She loses the election for president and begins to fade from the scene. But a bare-knuckled political rival won’t forget or forgive past slights. On Tuesday, one of his judges throws her in prison for seven years on transparently political charges. Now she’s a martyr. …

She started as an economist at a factory that built SS-18s and ICBMs in her hometown of Dnipropetrovsk. In late perestroika days, she got into business with her father-in-law, pirating films for VCR rentals and then transporting gasoline. …

Earlier that year, the new premier awarded her company [UES] an exclusive concession to deliver natural gas to Ukraine’s energy-guzzling factories. Monopoly power proved lucrative: UES tallied up revenues of $11 billion in 1996 alone, on which it paid, it was later revealed, just $11,000 in taxes. …

Between February 1996 and September 1997, UES wired at least $120 million into [Former Prime Minister Pavlo] Lazarenko’s accounts in Switzerland and Antigua, according to a subsequent U.S. investigation into money laundering, wire fraud and other alleged offenses committed by him. “All our business is designed to make Ukraine stronger,” Ms. Tymoshenko said that summer. Mr. Lazarenko sought asylum in the U.S., but a jury in San Francisco convicted him in 2004. He’s due to be released from a California prison next year. Both have denied any wrongdoing. …

After Mr. Lazarenko was forced out of office in July 1997, UES lost its political patronage and eventually went out of business. In a couple of years, Ms. Tymoshenko—by all accounts out of business for good—was a deputy prime minister in a Ukrainian government run by the eastern, Russian-speaking elites. Eventually she fell out with them, a common theme in her professional life.

When she re-emerged in 2004, at the head of street protests against her former political allies, Ms. Tymoshenko was reborn as a nationalist dressed and coifed in the style of a Ukrainian peasant girl. She was literally, and physically restyled, having been in the past the wealthy businesswoman nicknamed “The Gas Princess” she now went humble. She had perfected her Ukrainian and didn’t like to speak Russian. The Orange Revolution brought her back to power. Briefly a hero, she didn’t like to share the glory with another Orange leader, President Viktor Yushchenko, and their political marriage collapsed.

He lost support, then power. Her star rose. She ran her eponymous party and government with a heavy, some would say authoritarian, hand. In another role reversal, she grew close to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who condemned Tuesday’s court decision, calling it “dangerous” and “counterproductive.”

The entire thing is worth reading, and if you don’t have a Journal subscription, it’s worth the one-page purchase price. Tymoshenko’s protean transformations — to borrow Kaminski’s description — mirror the path of Ukrainian politics over the years; indeed, her recent conviction is merely an echo of her prosecution of the current President. Her success in the Orange Revolution was the first step to prosecuting the man she’d defeated, a prosecution short on international condemnation at the time.

A smart State Department would see a woman who has gone from apparently corrupt billionaire, to proud symbol of anti-Russian electoral freedom, to Prime Minister who tries to convict her political opponent (now President) for crimes older than the statute of limitations and who cozies up to Vladimir Putin, to disgraced opposition politician whose trial was marked by riots she apparently initiated in the courtroom itself. It would see Yanukovych leaving the days of Soviet dominance, to remaining a close political ally of Russia, to weaving a lurching but determined path between Western Europe and Russia, to the point at which Russia now openly backs Tymoshenko against Yanukovych. It would see Ukraine struggling out from under decades of Russian exploitation, with a sizable Russian minority, bobbing in and out of Russia’s orbit, but tracking closer and closer to the European Union — not least in its much-lauded, just-passed electoral reforms.

A smart State Department would ask: Who is the real Yanukovych? Who is the real Ukraine? Why is Vladimir Putin backing Tymoshenko if she is the voice of modernity? And will the real Tymoshenko please stand up?

A smart State Department would then ask whether we are pointing Ukraine in the wrong direction. Whatever his failings, Yanukovych is undeniably driving Ukraine into Europe’s, and not Russia’s embrace, both in Ukraine’s foreign policy and in the electoral and economic reforms on which he is staking his office. Is that something we want to endanger?

We don’t have a smart State Department. We have one that decries Tymoshenko’s conviction, then demands that Yanukovych overrule his judiciary and release her. The State Department is accusing Yanukovych of defiling the rule of law by allowing Tymoshenko’s prosecution and conviction, and demanding that he defile the rule of law by unilaterally voiding the conviction reached by a court of law.

One of the scariest things you can say is that this makes sense in Foggy Bottom.