Russia’s president. Vladimir III?

Ukraine has made Vladimir Putin look foolish. But at home, he remains unchallenged - and Russia and the world may be stuck with him

ON THE face of it, he seems humiliatingly weak. Vladimir Putin's intervention in Ukraine's election was one of his biggest mistakes as Russia's president. If Victor Yushchenko wins Ukraine's re-vote on December 26th, as seems likely, the waning of Russia's sway in its erstwhile “sphere of influence” will be embarrassingly obvious. At home, the seemingly interminable Yukos saga may be reaching its terminus. Yet the Kremlin's campaign against what was Russia's biggest oil company has been so mishandled that, even as it has dramatised Mr Putin's authority, it has also made him look amateurish and indecisive.

Appearances can be misleading, however. Ukraine's “orange revolution” may yet inspire independent forces elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. In Abkhazia, a breakaway micro-state in Georgia that is heavily dependent on Moscow, October's “presidential” vote is to be re-run, after Mr Putin's man apparently lost. But Russian liberals hoping for a revolution of their own face a long wait. Mr Putin's shadow post-Soviet empire may look more tenebrous than ever. Yet in Russia itself, the emperor still has clothes.

Russian politics is an odd combination of volatility - Chechnya, terrorism, Yukos - and inertia. Partly because of the Kremlin's control over Russian television, Mr Putin remains wildly popular. His approval ratings hover around 70%: down from their peak, but still impressively stellar. Indeed, so unassailable is his position that the question of how he might remain in power when his second presidential term expires in 2008 has developed into a lively debate among Moscow's commentariat.

Getting it and keeping it

The argument that Mr Putin will stay on is simple. Having accumulated power so determinedly, he and his entourage are unlikely to give it away. Centralisation has been Mr Putin's default response to any challenges. On past form, his humiliation in Ukraine may lead to a further tightening of the screws. Already, the media have been domesticated. A law to allow the president to appoint regional governors, announced after the Beslan school atrocity, has just gone through Russia's parliament. Another post-Beslan reform will squeeze out the last vestiges of independence in the Duma, the lower house.

Russia's notorious “oligarchs” have also been tamed. Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, two of the most unco-operative, are in exile. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, on trial for fraud and tax evasion, has been in prison since his arrest in October 2003. And Yukos, the oil company Mr Khodorkovsky once ran, looks set to be eviscerated when most of Yuganskneftegaz, its oil-production subsidiary, is sold on December 19th. What remains of Yukos may also be seized, to requite alleged tax debts of some $25 billion. The near-certain purchaser of Yugansk is Gazprom, the state-run gas monopoly. Swallowing Yugansk will turn Gazprom into an energy behemoth that serves Russia's foreign-policy interests even more powerfully.

Reviving the state's control over the energy industry may have been a motive for attacking Yukos in the first place. Mr Khodorkovsky's open meddling in politics was certainly another. Other, more acquisitive reasons may have sustained the campaign: nobody outside the Kremlin really knows. This opacity means that nobody can be sure if the Yugansk sale will be the beginning of the end of Mr Putin's confrontation with the oligarchs, or only the end of the beginning.

Sometimes the president implies that, if they behave, big businessmen can keep what they got in the privatisations of the 1990s. But at other times he is more bellicose. Oligarchs still at liberty in Russia are lying low. One unwelcome development came this week when VimpelCom, a telecoms firm part-owned by Mikhail Fridman's Alfa Group, was hit by a claim for back tax reminiscent of those previously sent to Yukos. The financial markets tumbled on the news.

The easiest way for Mr Putin to hang on to all his power would be to emulate Alexander Lukashenka, president of Belarus, and change Russia's constitution - either the clause limiting a president to two consecutive terms, or the one setting their length at four years. Mr Putin has repeatedly said that he will leave the constitution alone. But he could argue that terrorism, Chechnya and the supplications of his countrymen had changed his mind. Since a change would require approval by two-thirds of regional legislatures, conspiracy theorists see the reforms to regional government as a preparation.

Another possibility is that, true to his habit of observing the letter of the law while violating its spirit, Mr Putin might prefer to redistribute power from the presidency to parliament and United Russia, his pet party - a reform rather like the one President Leonid Kuchma is pushing through in Ukraine. Mr Putin could then avoid the messy inconvenience of direct elections. But this looks less likely. The Russian public, says Andrei Ryabov of the Carnegie Centre in Moscow, might find it hard to understand “two suns in one sky ” - -ie, Mr Putin and whichever stooge were installed as a weakened president. Russian leaders are used to behaving like tsars, as well as being regarded like them: taking big decisions but leaving much of the work, and the attendant unpopularity, to ministers. The government's approval rating is around half that of Mr Putin.

Or the president might choose what, pre-Ukraine, was the favoured means of succession across the former Soviet Union: the anointment of a trusted successor. On past form, that person could be toiling in an obscure government post. That would leave open the possibility of Mr Putin, a young and fit man, returning for another eight years in 2012: the constitution limits the consecutive terms a president may serve, not the total number.

Mr Putin is emerging more and more as a tactician, not a strategist. Economic reform, for example, has stalled since high oil prices offered an easier path to growth. His commitment to democracy now looks to be a tactic too. He may not yet have decided what to do in 2008. Boris Nemtsov, co-founder of a committee set up to make sure he leaves on schedule, says that, if he does want to stick around, international obloquy would give him greater pause than domestic opinion. European and American leaders would react badly to a rejigging of the government, and with horror to a change in the constitution.

In private, though, they might be relieved. A genuine transfer of the president's powers to a new man would be as perilous as it looks unlikely. Any challenge to Putinism would not come from the liberals, who were almost banished from the Duma at last year's election. As Vyacheslav Nikonov, an analyst with Kremlin connections, points out, without much exaggeration, “Putin is more liberal than 95% of Russians”. Nor would it come from the waning Communist Party. The coming men in Russian politics are less democratic, more nationalistic and more worrying even than Mr Putin - a point he may want to emphasise to his western critics.

Ukraine has made Vladimir Putin look foolish. But at home, he remains unchallenged - and Russia and the world may be stuck with him.

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