Tymoshenko, Yushchenko, and Yanukovych were once called the eternal triangle of Ukrainian politics, but eternity is not what it used to be.
One side of the triangle has disappeared.
Five years ago, when the Orange Revolution turned Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko into democratic heroes, the villain of the piece was Mr Yanukovych, the former Communist apparatchik who tried to steal the 2004 election.
But Mr Yushchenko was a very weak president except in one area: his obsessive feud with his former ally, prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, which all but paralysed the government of Ukraine for five wasted years.
It's likely she bears as much of the responsibility as he does for this disastrous clash of personalities, but she is a much more vivid personality and an adroit politician, so the public blamed Mr Yushchenko.
Now, he has lost the presidency in the most humiliating manner imaginable.
In complete denial about his loss of public support, Mr Yushchenko insisted on running again in the presidential election on January 17 and got only 5% of the vote.
It is Yulia (as she is known to everyone in Ukraine) who will slug it out with old enemy Mr Yanukovych in the second round of voting on February 7.
Last time round, this was a confrontation that seemed to matter.
It was a great story: the young democratic heroine Ms Tymoshenko, committed to modernising Ukraine and bringing it into the European Union and the Nato military alliance, versus the corrupt and colourless Mr Yanukovych, who wanted to drag Ukraine back into collectivist poverty and political subjugation to Russia.
But things look different this time.
The greatest difference is that there no longer seems to be such a difference between their policies.
It is now clear Ukraine will never join Nato: the alliance does not seek a confrontation with Russia, and only 20% of Ukrainians would support Nato membership anyway.
It is also obvious the European Union does not want to expand this far east.
It is already suffering severe indigestion from its last round of expansion in Eastern Europe, and taking in an even poorer country with a population of 46 million people would not rank very high on the EU's list of priorities even if Brussels were not also reluctant to annoy Russia.
So, Ms Tymoshenko and Mr Yanukovych no longer have much to disagree about in foreign policy.
Neither is there much to argue about on economic policy any more, since the country has few options left.
Five years of political paralysis made Ukraine vulnerable when the recession struck.
Its apparent prosperity depended on a huge inflow of foreign investment, and the prosperity drained away as fast as the foreign capital itself.
Ukraine's economy shrank 15% last year, and the national currency, the hryvnia, has halved in value.
Whether Mr Yanukovych or Ms Tymoshenko wins hardly matters economically.
Only massive loans from the IMF are keeping the economy afloat, and for some time to come it will be the IMF, not the new government, that makes the key economic decisions.
So, what's left? Well, they could fight over national identity.
The country's west is Ukrainian-speaking, and deeply nationalistic; the east mostly Russian-speaking, heavily industrialised, and would welcome closer ties with Russia.
So, this is the ground on which the two leading presidential candidates have chosen to fight, with Ms Tymoshenko promising to keep Ukrainian as the sole official language and Mr Yanukovych promising equal status for the Russian language.
Given the demography of Ukraine, this probably means Ms Tymoshenko will win the presidency in the second round of voting. (The nationalist vote was split too many ways in the first round, with a total of 18 candidates running.)
But who cares, apart from Ukrainians? The glory days of the Orange Revolution were misleading.
The key fact about the country is that Ukrainian per capita income is only about a third of Russia's.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine kept its steel and chemical industries, and even an aviation industry, but the oil and gas stayed in Russia.
Ukraine has to pay through the nose for it, and it must stay on good terms with Russia.
With so little room for manoeuvre abroad, and such rampant corruption at home (it is said 400 of the 450 members of parliament are millionaires), Ukrainians have grown very cynical about democracy.
A recent poll disclosed that only 30% of Ukrainians think the change to democracy has been good for their country, compared with 50% of Russians.
And only 26% of Ukrainians say they are satisfied with their lives.
Democracy does not heal all wounds.
• Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist.
