Yanukovych likes to say that the last five years have made him better. We remain hopeful of that, especially in light of an election rated by international and domestic observers as relatively clean and fair – a contrast to the 2004 presidential election that Yanukovych’s side tried to steal, prompting the Orange Revolution. Ukrainian voters have, five years later, alarmingly turned to Yanukovych to rescue the suffering nation from the mismanagement of the Orange Revolution winners.

We want the best. We hope Yanukovych’s team will make Ukraine more democratic, the economy more competitive and the rules of the game fairer. Fighting corruption should be at the top of the new administration’s agenda. In other words, we expect Yanukovych to keep his campaign promises.

But our expectations are different. Yanukovych has already given discouraging signals. He said that he plans to continue subsidies for industry. He said industrial giants pay too much for energy supplies such as natural gas. He wants to negotiate a new price with Russia’s Gazprom in exchange for a Kremlin stake in one of Ukraine’s greatest publicly owned assets – its vast pipelines that transport Russian fuel to Europe.

Yanukovych also spoke in favor of Kuchma-era barter schemes that dried up the state budget and kept most financial operations well under the revenue department’s radar.

There are also no signs that privatization of public assets will be transparent and clean. That means we should expect more shameful privatizations like that of Kryvorizhstal, the nation’s No. 1 steel giant, which the Kuchma-Yanukovych team tried to sell for a small fraction of its worth to their two oligarch buddies, Victor Pinchuk and Rinat Akhmetov. Ukraine owes a huge debt of gratitude to the vanquished Orange heroes – President Victor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko – for reversing that scam in 2005 and fetching $4.8 billion, six times the Pinchuk-Akhmetov price tag.

Sleazy was the way business was done back then – and all perfectly legal. But these practices were still wrong and, in our view, effectively amounted to looting the nation.

We also do not expect a Yanukovych presidency to bring any justice to any of Ukraine’s greatest unsolved crimes – including the murders of politically connected people, suspicious poisonings and deaths and the grand-scale theft of public money and the like.

The most realistic expectation that we have is that Ukrainians, with support from the international community, will put pressure early on the new president to keep the nation on the road to democracy and prosperity, not autocracy and stagnation.