According to the 2011 NIT report, Ukraine’s rating for electoral processes stands at 3.50 and is identical to the rating it had in 2005, the first year of Orange rule, and the same as in 2009, the last year of President Viktor Yushchenko’s presidency.

Moreover, the 2011 survey’s assessment of the strength and independence of civil society shows Ukraine at 2.75 (the same rating as in the Yushchenko years 2006-2010) and a better rating that the 3.00 registered in 2005 – the year of the Orange Revolution. Media independence declined from a rating of 3.5 to 3.75, a judgement justified by the increasingly uncritical tone of television news (though balanced by the freewheeling discourse on popular political talk shows).

However, even this decline means Ukraine’s media freedoms are on a par with EU members Bulgaria and Romania, and incipient EU member Croatia.
Moreover, Ukraine’s electoral processes are sounder than in Georgia, Moldova, and Kosovo. And Ukrainian civil society operates with greater freedom and vitality than Georgia’s.

In the end, according to Freedom House, Ukraine remains the most open of the non-Baltic Soviet states with an overall democracy score significantly better than that of Georgia. But few people in Washington or Brussels would assert that Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili is dangerously close to becoming another Lukashenko. ~Adrian Karatnycky

No, they wouldn’t. Even though Saakashvili has had no problem aligning himself with Lukashenko in recent years when the latter was antagonizing Moscow, no one would want to think of them as anything other than opposites. Granted, that has more to do with the perception of Saakashvili as “pro-Western” and therefore more “democratic” by default. Political conditions may be largely unchanged under Yanukovych, and integration with Europe may be proceeding, but these things aren’t nearly as satisfying as vilifying Yanukovych as nothing more than a Kremlin stooge. It turns out that the last Ukrainian presidential election was not quite the harbinger of democratic retreat that some made it out to be.