One of the accusations that has been hurled recently against America is that it cares about democracy only in the case of its selected Muslim enemies, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. What better case to put the lie to that accusation than that of Ukraine, where the Bush administration just risked a standoff with Russia to prevent the stealing of an election? And this in a country not of Muslims but Orthodox Christians.

There are plenty of reasons to pay attention even apart from the outrageous violations of fair electoral practices in the country’s recent presidential poll, in which the pro-Russian old guard premier, Viktor Yanukovich, unexpectedly “beat” the Western-oriented opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko. Ukraine is the pivot of the post-Soviet bloc, now reincarnated as the Commonwealth of Independent States. It possesses one of Europe’s largest land masses and has a population the size of France’s.

Ukraine, rather like contemporary Russia, is largely run on the basis of a close melding of residually authoritarian state structures and vast oligarchic interests. If democracy undermines that tangled skein, and Mr. Putin no longer has a powerful and compatible foreign cognate via which to exert influence there and elsewhere in the CIS, if a genuinely reformed Ukraine found a secure place within the European Union – adopting en route the kind of liberalizing measures advocated by Mr. Yushchenko such as corporate transparency and contract enforcement – it would throw into question Moscow’s plans for an alternative scheme of regional economic integration.

That is why the vested interests in both Ukraine and Russia are prepared to take such a risk with world opinion. Nearly half of the $60 million spent by Mr. Yanukovich has come from Russian sources. Russia’s attempt to influence the election’s outcome even includes the little-noticed dispatch of Russian Spetznaz, or special forces, detachments to Ukrainian bases as a reminder of what Soviet spokesmen would have called the “correlation of forces.” The relationship between the reactionary Messrs. Yanukovich and Putin has come to resemble that which obtained between the Polish Communist leader, Wojtech Jaruzelski, and the Soviet premier, Leonid Brezhnev.

But has the American response been as robust now as it was then? One of the world’s leading authorities on Russian-Ukrainian relations, James Sherr of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, observes that since September 11 there has been a tendency to view everything through the prism of the war on Islamist terror. Because Mr. Putin has been something of an ally in that struggle, he is given something of a free pass. He and others of that ilk, such as President Karimov of Uzbekistan, know it and are emboldened to use the war as a flag of convenience for their other, less laudable objectives.

Secretary Powell and President Bush have been positively Reaganesque in facing this issue. “It is time for Ukrainian leaders to decide whether they are on the side of democracy or not,” Mr. Powell said last week with sparkling clarity as he declined to accept the declaration of Mr. Yanukovich as the winner. A White House statement last week said “The United States is deeply disturbed by extensive and credible indications of fraud committed in the Ukrainian presidential election. We strongly support efforts to review the conduct of the election and urge Ukrainian authorities not to certify results until investigations of organized fraud are resolved.”

Quite an improvement over the blunder of President George H.W. Bush, whose remarks at the Ukrainian capital as the Soviet Union was unraveling is known as the Chicken Kiev Speech. The remarks the 43rd president have helped inspire the demonstrators in Ukraine and the Parliament there, who have rejected the attempt to install Mr. Yanukovich. Mr. Yushchenko is reportedly seeking a revote on December 12 under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

The events in Ukraine, after all, are being watched closely not only in Washington but by all those in the lands of the former Soviet Union and around the world who believe, with Americans, that freedom is a universal human value.