Ukraine latest victim of bad governance...bailed out by Putin with no "quid pro quo"?

Apparently, Ukraine has become the latest to prostrate itself on the altar of Russian reserves, with the announcement from the leaders of both countries, Yanukovich and Putin respectively, that gas prices have been significantly reduced for the Ukraine and the cliff  of bankruptcy over which the country was dangling has been averted. And, according to Putin, there is no quid pro quo...
Nevertheless, the people are still protesting "sell-out" in the streets of Kiev, and the tenure of the Ukraine president is not worth  betting on.
Buying influence, brazenly bribing a country facing public protests in favour of a closer connection to the European Union, has become one of the less savoury instruments in the foreign policy arsenal.
Clearly the move gives Putin another front page headline in his continuing competition with the 'west' as he seeks to expand Russian hegemony in the region. However, given the apparently public standards attached to the fund from which the bail-out was paid, there seems to be considerable discrepancy between those criteria and the existing situation in the Ukraine.
Crafty, cunning, opportunistic and clearly brazen, Putin is proving himself an extremely devious and potentially dangerous Russian leader, even to Russian opponents most of whom have either been silenced or removed. One wonders about the tactics of such a leader, especially given the latest "collaboration" from Obama over Syrian chemical weapons.
On the Ukraine side, clearly the current leader was/is desperate for a quick-fix to his political dilemma...so many protesters, with so many cell phones and so much global coverage, cannot be secreted away into some prison cell somewhere. And their quest of further links to the European Union will not evaporate with the latest agreement.
In fact, that goal will only get additional impetus, given the opposition to the Russian deal from the people of the Ukraine.
Perhaps it might be timely to remind ourselves of the old adage: "You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time"...in reference to this "deal"...
And eventually, there will be news of the price paid by the Ukraine president in his "sell-out" of both his country and his people and by then, one assumes, the Russian president is counting on the abbreviated memory of both Ukrainian people and the rest of the world to fail to recall his cunning and highly opportunistic deal-making...but the winter cold will have consumed gas at the new and much lower prices by then.
We have heard of other bail-outs in Italy, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and potentially Spain....and then in North America, only this week, a judge in Detroit concurred with that city's petition for bankruptcy, with dozens of other U.S. cities facing the same fate....and cities falling like bowling pins, at the mercy of flagrantly irresponsible municipal politicians over decades of absent scrutiny from both the public and the media does not paint a bright picture for their previously hard-working civil servants, many of whom have lost their pensions and for the futures of the people still trying to make their cities work.
The relationship between government and people, as well as between government and corporations has to be re-calculated because just as it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes the whole community to nurture and sustain both cities and counties and even countries....and a sleeping or drugged population wakens too late for the crisis to be managed in their preferred manner.

Russia Offers Cash Infusion for Ukraine
By David M. Herszenhorn and Andrew E. Kramer, New York Times, December 17, 2013      

For Mr. Putin, the jousting over Ukraine is the latest of several foreign policy moves that have served to re-establish Russia as a counterweight to Western dominance of world affairs. This year, he defied Washington by granting temporary asylum to Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, and deflected an American military strike on his longtime ally, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, with a proposal to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons.

There was no immediate quid pro quo for Russia — at least not in plain sight — as Mr. Putin announced the deal at the Kremlin with Ukraine’s embattled president, Viktor F. Yanukovich. Protesters in Kiev have been deeply worried that Mr. Yanukovich would cut a secret deal to join a customs union that Russia has established with Belarus and Kazakhstan. The union is essentially a free-trade zone across a large section of the former Soviet Union, allowing goods to cross travel through borders without clearing customs.

Over the weeks of protests, however, it became clear that the customs union was a nonstarter for Ukraine, and Mr. Putin said the subject did not come up in their discussions on Tuesday.

In Independence Square, where the large crowd was bolstered by people coming out of work, the initial reaction appeared to be a mix of fury and dismay, with people chanting, “Out with the crook!” But there was no call for drastic new steps.

Leaders of the three opposition parties who are coordinating the protest said the demonstrations would continue, and they voiced suspicions about what Mr. Yanukovich had offered in exchange for a Russian bailout.

“Free cheese is only found in a mousetrap,” Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, the leader of the Fatherland coalition in Parliament, said in a speech. He asked for the patience of protesters.

The implications for the protest movement were not immediately clear, but Mr. Putin’s announcement, at a Kremlin meeting with Mr. Yanukovich, substantially alters the political landscape. It throws Mr. Yanukovich an economic and political lifeline that will spare him for now from negotiations with the International Monetary Fund, which was demanding significant changes to the government, judiciary and the economy in exchange for aid.

While Mr. Putin portrayed Russia’s assistance as a gallant move, requiring Ukraine neither to commit to the customs union nor to put in place any of the austerity measures demanded by the I.M.F., the rescue plan carries serious long-term economic and political risks. Experts say that unless Ukraine carries out overhauls, including increases in household utility rates, limits on government spending and pension increases, and improvements in the business climate, the country’s economic problems will continue, raising the likelihood that the aid will be wasted.

In addition, the political uncertainty raises the possibility of changes at the highest levels of government, perhaps even sooner than the presidential elections in February 2015.

Then there is the immediate investment risk. Russia’s rules for its national welfare fund require investments in countries with long-term bond ratings of AA or better; both Fitch and Standard & Poor’s rate Ukraine at B-.

Mr. Putin, sitting beside Mr. Yanukovich on Tuesday, said Russia was happy to help. “With the goal of supporting the budget of Ukraine, the government of the Russian Federation made the decision to issue in bonds from the Ukrainian government part of its own reserves from the national welfare fund in the amount of $15 billion,” he said.

Nodding to the demands in the West, he added: “I want to bring your attention to the fact that it is not connected with any conditions, not connected with the increase, decrease or freezing of any social standards, pensions, subsidies or salaries.

“And I want to calm everyone down. Today we did not discuss the question of Ukraine’s accession to the customs union.”