Fathoming what’s inside the head of President Viktor Yanukovych’s foreign policymakers is a daunting task.

Perhaps they had a strategy that, on paper, looked promising in keeping alive Ukraine’s 20-year tradition of playing the West off against Russia.

Or perhaps this administration never had any intention of accepting democratic standards or achieving European Union integration, and their bluff is finally being called.

Something’s gone terribly awry and it’s hard to see how the administration will extricate itself from near-pariah status internationally, short of throwing itself on the mercy of its foreign partners and apologizing profusely.

With the West, Yanukovych tried to posture as a democrat, perhaps thinking he’d get a free pass on his authoritarian ways as long as he moved Ukraine away from Russia.

It isn’t working. Few Western leaders want to have anything to do with him in light of the Yulia Tymoshenko guilty verdict.

With Russia, Yanukovych may have thought he could get a better deal on natural gas prices in a Kremlin bid to woo him away from the West. But Vladimir Putin doesn’t woo. He reads geopolitical realities well.

The West isn’t going to accept Yanukovych into the European family of nations soon – meaning that Putin can bully Ukraine over gas prices, strategic industries and the Russian-led customs union.

Playing both sides, the West and Russia, worked well enough for years. Both sides, however, no longer want to play the game.

Ukraine’s leaders are sadly realizing that nations with no superpower status, as China and Russia have, must decide what they are going to be.

The choice for Ukraine is either democratic, if the West is the destination, or a semi-sovereign protectorate where human rights don’t matter, if domestic political monopoly and Moscow is the way forward.