The Ukrainian prime minister, Viktor Yushchenko, was forced out of office yesterday by communist MPs backed by big business, throwing the country into confusion.
The resignation of the country's most trusted politician cut short his attempts to end corruption and pursue pro-western policies, and consolidated the power of the widely discredited president, Leonid Kuchma.
It also boosted the Russian strategy of drawing former Soviet states back into Moscow's orbit and polarising Ukraine between the pro-Russian east and the nationalist west.
But, out of office, Mr Yushchenko is expected to exploit the crisis and his enhanced popularity to lead the opposition to President Kuchma.
"I am not abandoning politics; I am leaving in order to return," he said
Yuliya Tymoshenko, the opposition leader whom Mr Kuchma sacked as deputy prime minister in January, immediately invited Mr Yushchenko to lead her campaign against the president.
Ukraine's polarisation was evident in the heart of the capital Kiev yesterday.
As MPs gathered in parliament to pass the vote of no confidence in the prime minister, thousands of Mr Yushchenko's supporters were outside demanding Mr Kuchma's impeachment.
The president has been under attack since the publication of details from a tape recording purportedly revealing him ordering the rigging of elections in 1999 and authorising the murder of a journalist last year.
The no-confidence vote was carried by a 263 to 69.
Mr Yushchenko's opponents accused him of leading the country into economic ruin, even though last year he gave Ukraine its first economic growth in the 10 years since its independence from the former Soviet Union.
"Democracy in Ukraine has suffered a serious defeat," he said.
"The political elite ... showed itself unable to accept a legal economy and public politics."
Although the communists have long been opposed to Mr Yushchenko's government, the no-confidence vote would have failed without the backing of the centrist parties, which are beholden to the millionaire clan leaders who dominate Ukraine's notoriously corrupt public life, and the tacit assent of Mr Kuchma, who appointed Mr Yushchenko prime minister at the end of 1999.
It came after months of demonstrations, sackings, and occasional violence triggered by the secret tape revelations, allegedly from Mr Kuchma's office, but it was seen not merely as another government tussle but as a signpost to the future direction of the biggest country in eastern Europe.
One of Mr Yushchenko's supporters in parliament, Vasili Chervony, said the choice facing the parliament was not for or against the prime minister, but "for Russia or for Europe".
"The KGB men in the Kremlin are re-assembling their empire."
Given the threats to his position, Mr Kuchma appears to be battening down the hatches and making concessions to the industrial oligarchs who run Ukraine and feared that Mr Yushchenko's economic reforms would imperil their control of key national assets.
He sought to distance himself from the row, refusing to support Mr Yushchenko before the vote, and after it blaming him for being unwilling to make compromises.
Mr Yushchenko was under strong pressure to give cabinet seats to several oligarchs' supporters, but he refused to make changes which would have neutered his policies.
If western diplomats in Kiev were hugely dismayed by yesterday's events, Moscow was quietly satisfied. Following the recent election triumph of pro-Moscow communists in neighbouring Moldova, the downfall of Mr Yushchenko helps to surround President Vladimir Putin with broadly supportive regimes.
Privately, Russian diplomats are even suggesting that Ukraine may yet ask to join the Russia-Belarus union, although this seems far-fetched, since the union is a feeble con struct and membership would polarise Ukraine even more completely.
Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian parliament's foreign affairs committee, summed up Moscow's view of the crisis by claiming that Mr Yushchenko was supported only by "extreme nationalists" and his government was at the mercy of "western arm-twisting".
Ukrainian opinion polls show Mr Yushchenko to be easily the most popular and most trusted politician in the country, and 4m signatures were collected supporting him and opposing yesterday's no-confidence vote.