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Ukraine is not yet lost. Yes, it's a gobsmacking reversal that Viktor Yanukovych, whose election fraud in the 2004 sparked the Orange Revolution, has now been voted in as President. But this is not the triumph of a blue counterrevolution. If anything, it confirms that Ukraine is becoming a serious democracy, rather than the Russian-type virtual democracy it used to be.

Unlike many so-called elections in authoritarian regimes, we did not know the result of this one in advance. Experienced international election monitors found it to be free and fair. The defeated Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko should not be disputing the result; she should be starting her campaign to win in 2015.

Mr. Yanukovych will seek a close relationship with Russia, but there is no evidence that the oligarchs behind him want Ukraine to cease being an independent country. Their interest is to play both sides: Russia and the European Union. Mr. Yanukovych himself now says Ukraine's integration into the EU is “our strategic aim.”

For friends of freedom in Ukraine, there are five tough years ahead. Real threats to the country's effective sovereignty remain, including Russia's use of the natural-gas supply as a weapon and the possibility of a blowup over the Crimean peninsula, where the majority of the population is Russian and Russia's Black Sea fleet commands Sevastopol.

But if these potential storms are weathered, and Mr. Yanukovych is voted out in 2015, then future historians may yet see this as a zigzag step on the path to the consolidation of an independent Ukraine. That will, however, require courage in Kiev, restraint in Moscow and strategic thinking in Brussels – qualities currently in short supply.

As someone who witnessed the Orange Revolution in Kiev and welcomed it enthusiastically, I must frankly acknowledge the disappointment that followed. Viktor Yushchenko turned out to be a pretty hopeless president, even before his hands were tied in power-sharing knots by the constitutional compromise that ended that negotiated revolution. Read the epilogue to the latest edition of Andrew Wilson's The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation, an excellent history of Ukraine, and you find yourself in a world closer to The Sopranos than to The West Wing.

Oligarchs tussle behind the scenes of Ukrainian politics like mobsters. Corruption is endemic, the country has slid down the economic freedom index and the economy shrunk by more than 14 per cent last year. Ordinary Ukrainians can speak freely and choose among election candidates – turnout in this vote was close to 70 per cent – but they have good reason to be disappointed by the lack of material improvement, legal security and social justice.

It's also true that over the past five years Ukraine has received less support from the EU than it should have. European leaders have been disgracefully mealy-mouthed about the prospect of the country joining the union. Yet even Ukraine's strongest advocates, such as former Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski, have to acknowledge that the Ukrainians have often been their own worst enemies. Europe cannot do for Ukraine what it will not do for itself.

In this respect, and for all her faults, the narrowly defeated Ms. Tymoshenko would have made a better president. Even by the low standards of post-communist politics, Mr. Yanukovych is a lumpen figure. A joke I heard in Kiev at the time of his 2004 candidacy asked, “Did you know that Yanukovych is seeking a third term?” (His first two terms were in prison, as a very young man, for robbery, grievous bodily harm and sexual assault.)

The only silver lining is that he will surely mobilize young Ukrainians in embarrassment, disgust and ridicule.

The question now is what the EU can do to help Ukraine move toward a freer and more prosperous and European future. This is a question posed particularly to one EU leader whose own pronouncements have so far been of truly Yanukovychian dullness. I mean, of course, the High Representative for Foreign Policy, Catherine Ashton.

The EU should move beyond its current weaselly language (“acknowledging the European aspirations of Ukraine and welcoming its European choice”) to say, “We want you to be a member, when you satisfy all the conditions for membership. This is in our interest as well as yours.”

It will be hard work to get all of the EU's national leaders to commit to that, but Ms. Ashton should start chipping away at it now. Five years in European politics is a long time.

Meanwhile, there is stuff she can start doing. As she builds up the EU's new foreign service, she must decide where to concentrate diplomatic and financial resources. The places where the EU can have maximum impact are in the immediate neighbourhood, and few matter more than Ukraine.

Although Mr. Yanukovych is likely to turn to Moscow for a special gas deal, Brussels should keep plugging away at the need to have more realistic domestic gas prices, more energy efficiency and more diversified, better integrated supply networks. This is a vital European interest. Remember that when Russia turned off the gas going through Ukraine in January, 2009, the eastern half of the EU caught a cold.

As for ordinary Ukrainians, the one thing that would make the most difference would be the easing of visa restrictions. Anyone who saw the psychological impact in Serbia of last December's announcement of visa-free travel to the EU will know what I mean.

This is boring, slow, unspectacular stuff, but that's what the EU is good at. A tortoise should do what a tortoise can. I'm told it sometimes even beats a Russian hare.

Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European studies at Oxford University.