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‘I think Ukraine will be ashamed of its choice. But that is . . . democracy,” the country’s outgoing president, Viktor Yushchenko, told journalists as he left the polling station in Kiev.

A bitter Mr Yushchenko, architect of the country’s 2004 democratic Orange Revolution, who was trounced in the first round of the election and admitted he was voting “none of the above” in the second, expressed the seeming paradox at the heart of the elections: that the voters could plump for the candidate he defeated in 2004, Viktor Yanukovich, the epitome of the country’s pre-revolutionary, Russian-leaning totalitarian past and a man implicated in vote-rigging. But free elections mean allowing people to change their minds, even to be wrong and inconsistent.