By Stephen Mulvey BBC News Online

The Ukrainian election has brought two important results.

It has provided the liberal former prime minister, Viktor Yushchenko, with a springboard from which to bid for the presidency in 2004, and it has shifted the parliament's centre of gravity to the right.

For the first time, Ukraine has a parliament in which the Communist Party is marginalised with just 67 projected seats out of 450.

However, in some ways little has changed.

The new parliament, like its predecessor, is likely to be a hung parliament.

President Leonid Kuchma, and the bureaucrats and industrial barons that represent the backbone of his administration, will probably still be able to get their way, a lot of the time, by cutting deals with Communists and independents, or Mr Yushchenko's Our Ukraine bloc.

Bargaining position

There has even been talk of a coalition, possibly of bringing members of Our Ukraine into government.

It's notable that Mr Yushchenko himself has never described Our Ukraine as an "opposition" group, and has insisted that he is still ready to work with anyone, including President Kuchma, for the benefit of the country.

It is unlikely Mr Kuchma will be able to run for a third term

Mr Yushchenko evidently had Mr Kuchma's support for most of the economic reforms he introduced as prime minister, between 1999 and 2001.

In the next parliament, Our Ukraine is sure to back, in principle, the government's intention to carry out tax reform and a new round of privatisation, even if it disagrees on the details.

Under the Ukrainian political system there is no necessity for a change of government after a parliamentary election, though any new candidate for Prime Minister would need to be confirmed by parliament.

Unlikely candidate

No-one knows quite how Mr Yushchenko is going to carry himself as a party leader, or whether he will now, finally, take up the banner of opposition and political confrontation.

It's not a role the quiet former accountant appears to have been cut out for, nor has it often been a path to power in the states of the former Soviet Union, where the popular vote is only one of a number of tools used for effecting political change.

Mr Kuchma is widely thought to be seeking a deal that would allow him to anoint his own successor and receive a guarantee of immunity from prosecution in return - following the Yeltsin/Putin model.

The result of this election has already ruled out the most attractive alternative - changing the constitution to allow him a third term - because the two-thirds parliamentary majority needed for constitutional amendments is definitely beyond his reach.

At the moment Mr Yushchenko appears to be an extremely unlikely candidate as the chosen successor, but it's now hard to envisage a candidate who could run against him in a fair presidential election and win.

He's in a strong bargaining position, and may now wish to exploit this rather than declaring political war.