Consider it something we've forgotten

The power of protest, the strength of mass nonviolent action, the public courage of personal conviction taken to the streets.

On Monday, Ukraine President Leonid Kuchma called for a new presidential election "to maintain peace and accord." He's offered no details, but the firewall in front of a new election has been breached.

And today, the man who officially won but is accused of having done it by fraud, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, said he would accept a new election and offered to not run again, provided that his rival, Viktor Yushchenko, does the same.

And in another significant shift, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who openly supported Yanukovich during the campaign and twice congratulated him on his victory, was quoted by German Chancellor Gerhardt Schröder's office as saying that he was prepared to accept the results of a new election.

(Putin was feeling some domestic heat of his own:

Mr. Putin's most prominent liberal critics, including Irina M. Khakamada, Boris E. Nemtsov and the chess champion Garry Kasparov, issued an open letter today urging Mr. Putin to accept Ukraine's choice, which, in their view, is Mr. Yushchenko.

"The leadership of Russia must respect the choice of the Ukrainian people even if this choice conflicts with some personal but difficult-to-explain preferences of the Kremlin," the critics wrote in the letter, read on the Ekho Moskvy radio station.)

What's more, regional leaders in the eastern, Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine, who had threatened to hold a referendum on autonomy, backed down.

It was undoubtedly developments like these that prompted Yushchenko to immediately rejects Yanukovich's proposal as well as his offer

to appoint Mr. Yushchenko prime minister and consider amendments to the Constitution that would share power between the country's starkly divided blocs.

"The election was falsified," Mr. Yushchenko said in televised remarks. "As long as this problem is not solved, all the other problems are secondary."

Yanukovich is looking increasingly isolated but he hasn't folded his hand, premising his offers on a court finding that the election results were invalid. Still, it's very likely that, at some point, some sort of compromise is going to be forced on the parties. Perhaps what we'll find is that instead of President Yanukovich offering the office of prime minister to Yushchenko, we'll have President Yushchenko offering it to Yanukovich.

The difference is the power of the people.