A wary Russian leader is centralising power in the Kremlin. Sound familiar? Chris Stephen, in Moscow, reports on a bruising year for Vladimir Putin.
Norman Mailer once wrote that the only way to appreciate the full force of a heavyweight boxing contest was to sit ringside. Only there can you absorb the full titanic violence of blows traded and damage inflicted.
The same has been true, this past year, of Russian President Vladimir Putin's relations with the West. Seen from a distance, the bland declarations from occasional summits that all is well are just about believable. But, up close and personal, this has been a brutal year which has left the relationship shattered and both fighters happy to retreat to their corners for the end-of-year bell.
Round One came in the spring inside a tiny, crumbling courthouse in the Moscow suburbs. Here began the ongoing trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man and controller of Russia's mightiest oil company, Yukos. Officially, he was being prosecuted for tax evasion, but many in the West, and in Russia, felt that the battle was personal. Prosecutors had concentrated on him, and ignored Russia's other tycoons, only because Khodorkovsky had begun to back parties opposed to President Vladimir Putin. This suspicion seemed confirmed when, while prosecutors demanded $10 billion in back taxes, other justice departments froze Yukos accounts. The result was that Yukos could not pay its bill and was put up for an auction with just one bidder - the state-controlled gas giant, Gazprom.
For Moscow, the disciplining of Yukos was necessary to keep the ship of state running smoothly. For many in the West, it gave the lie to Putin's recent economic reforms. In turn, the Kremlin told the outside world to stay out of Russia's affairs.
Round Two came in September, amid the burned timbers of a little schoolhouse in a small town at the very southern tip of Russia. Under these charred timbers, more than 300 children had died an agonising death when rebels from the war in neighbouring Chechnya had set off mines strung above their heads.
Yet a horrifying crime which united the world in grief also divided it. The West said that Russia was partly to blame - for allowing human rights abuses in Chechnya on a vast scale and for refusing to negotiate with the rebels. The Kremlin shot back that it would never negotiate with the sort of people who blow up innocent children.
Things then got worse. Under the guise of tightening anti-terrorist laws, Putin scrapped democratic elections for governors, announcing that he would appoint them himself. Then came new rules to exclude minor parties from parliament. How this would help in the war against terror was not explained.
Europe and the United States criticised the move as authoritarian. Putin insisted that, in a time of crisis, the state must be strong.
And then came Ukraine. For the West, the crowds clad in the banners of the Orange Revolution seemed to be an affirmation of the power democracy could still have in the minds of those who did not have it. For Putin, it was a disaster.
Putin had made no secret of backing the government's presidential candidate, Victor Yanukovich, against opposition challenger Victor Yushchenko. Yanukovich's government, after all, had signed up to the Customs Union, a trading bloc centred on Moscow and intended to be a counterweight to the European Union.
In late November, the second round of voting saw international monitors cry foul in unusually strident terms. However, even as protesters were pouring on to the streets, Putin declared the election "honest" and congratulated Yanukovich on winning it.
Perhaps he was badly advised. Perhaps his comments were misunderstood. But the outside world was shocked by Putin's call. Backing Yanukovich was one thing. Backing an election declared rigged was something else. At the summit of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, America and Russia traded insults on a scale not seen since the Cold War: each told the other to stay out of Ukraine's internal affairs.
And suddenly the battle lines were drawn. The Economist magazine, for long a champion of Putin's economic reforms, declared: "It is time to see Mr Putin as a challenger, not a friend." A NATO/Russia summit soon afterwards papered over the cracks, with all sides insisting that they were committed to Ukraine's re-run elections, but the damage had been done.
Putin and the West are now set on very different courses. The European Union sees its eastward march as a unifying crusade to bring all of Europe under the same umbrella. Russia sees it as a threat. Most of the men in the Kremlin are, like Putin, products of the Cold War. In five years of office he has surrounded himself with people, like himself, who spent their lives in the KGB. In Moscow, they are nicknamed the "Siloviki", or Strong-Men, and they control most government departments.
They seem to see the West, and America in particular, as set on world domination, a view confirmed in their minds by the invasion of Iraq.
This time last year it was still possible to imagine that Europe, from the Irish Sea to the Urals, was on a mission towards eventual integration - of economics if not politics. Then came 2004. The result of this heavyweight slugfest has been to conjure up once more the old Cold War confrontation line, albeit further east than it once was.
On December 26th, the fighters came out of their corners in Ukraine, ready for the next round.
And we know what happened there.