Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych has signed a deal with Russia. The European Union has all but given up on him, and the protesters are refocusing their efforts on long-term resistance. At least for now, it looks like Russia has won.

Russia’s deal, signed December 17, removes many of the financial pressures Ukraine faced. Russia will buy $15 billion worth of Ukrainian bonds and cut gas prices from $400 per thousand cubic meters to $269, until 2019. Without this kind of lifeline, Ukraine could have risked going bankrupt. But some are worried about what strings may have been attached to the giveaway.

The weekend after the deal saw a significant fall in the number of protesters. Reuters and the bbc reported that 100,000 turned out on Kiev’s Independence Square on Sunday, with afp putting that figure at 40,000. That’s still a lot of people, but a sharp decrease from 200,000 last week and a peak of half a million before that.

The protests lack both a single leader and a strategy for getting what they want. “A month on, the opposition leaders have kept pledges to appear almost nightly for the crowds and demanded amnesty for a few dozen who were arrested, but lack much of a plan,” reports the New York Times. “What they seemed to rally around this week was the idea of building a political movement out of the hundreds of thousands who have passed through EuroMaidan, as the current protests are known.”

The protest leaders seem to hold out hopes for the long-term success of what they are doing, but they’ve all but given up on any quick changes.

The EU holds a similar view. “The European Union is open to Ukrainian people, but not necessarily the current Ukrainian government—that’s the message,” said Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite, who also holds the rotating chairmanship of the EU.

Both the EU and protesters are beginning to concede this battle to Russia—but they’ve not given up the war.

However, that doesn’t detract from the fact that this is a Russian victory—the latest in a string of victories. Russian President Vladimir Putin humiliated America twice: once over Edward Snowden, and then Syria. Now it’s the EU’s turn.

For Ukraine’s Yanukovych it looks a victory too. He’s retained the presidency and also, as far as we can tell from what’s been published, his independence from Russia. His interests are closely aligned with Putin, but he has no desire to become Putin’s vassal. Unless his deal with Putin contained some dramatic secret clauses, Yanukovych has kept Ukraine out of Russia’s customs union.

Russia can live with that. It means it doesn’t have to take on Ukraine’s problems. As long as Ukraine is not aligned with a foreign power, such as nato, then Russia is secure.

The downside of this arrangement, from Putin’s point of view, is that he could face exactly the same fight a few years down the road—perhaps during the 2015 presidential elections. Which is why it’s possible he forged some kind of private agreement with Yanukovych to stop that from happening.

In the meantime, Putin looks every inch the most powerful man in the world—a title Forbesbestowed on him earlier in the year. For more on the important role this man plays in world events, see Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry’s recent Key of David program “Russia in Prophecy.”