Now don’t get me wrong here. I’m genuinely just wondering how else it is possible to interpret his announcement yesterday that re-running the elections would not be fair.

Yushchenko himself argues that the last round was rife with corruption and fraud. International observers back him up on this. Voters were intimidated and beaten, the count was flawed and – most importantly for this situation – votes went missing.

If votes went missing and those that were left were mis-counted, how can Yushchenko be so certain he was the rightful winner? He can’t possibly know – no one does. The only way he can gain any kind of democratic legitimacy is for the elections to run again – utterly fairly this time – and for him to win them fair and square.

How can running them again possibly be a problem for him? If his support is as great as he claims then surely he should storm it? Naturally it would have been better for Ukraine if they could have got a clear winner from the first lot, but it has descended into chaos and near-farce now. Time to wipe the slate clean and start again, surely – and let the best man (which I am pretty sure is Yushchenko, for the record) win.

Update: There have been a couple of very good comments made to this post. If you want a better idea of the situation, I strongly suggest you have a read.