President Vladimir Putin has won an overwhelming victory in Russia's deeply flawed parliamentary elections. Those who validly criticise the manner of his victory in a contest that freely reflected voters' preferences for his United Russia party but quite unfairly restricted democratic and media access to opposing parties must then decide which result is the more important.
We do not know how Mr Putin will choose to exercise power beyond his second presidential term which expires next year. But there is little room to doubt he will be a potent force over the next 5-10 years and that he will draw legitimacy from this election.
Such is Russia's managed democracy. It expresses several key values arising from the country's traumatic transition over the last 20 years from Gorbachev's reformist communism through Yeltsin's chaotic free market radicalism to Putin's authoritarian consolidation of Russia's recent position as a resource-rich state in a world suddenly short of oil and gas. There is an intimate relationship between politics and economics in this story. Major western states have persisted for too long in seeing Russia through the political psychology of the 1990s - effectively as a defeated or fundamentally weakened world power that could be disregarded at will in economic terms and taken for granted geopolitically.
Mr Putin fiercely rejects any such triumphalist characterisation and so do those who have voted for his party. They are ashamed of how a vulnerable Russian state in transition from the Soviet Union was exploited at home and abroad and determined this will not be repeated now that it has retrieved its basic political and economic sovereignty. They resent external criticism of their electoral conduct and insist on diplomatic reciprocity and inter-state equality. They demand that Russia's essential interests as a great land power be respected, especially in their near abroad or geographical and spatial periphery. And insist no new dividing lines be drawn in Europe to exclude their proper involvement.
The force of these arguments must be acknowledged in assessing Mr Putin's role, even as the manner in which he has achieved this victory is deplored. Many international organisations yesterday criticised the conduct of these elections. Their effect had already been reduced by changes in the electoral laws since 2004 which restricted individual choice, raised voting thresholds for parties getting into the Duma, constrained the Central Electoral Commission and introduced presidential nomination of regional governors. During this contest there was a flagrant contraction in the range and independence of media coverage for opposition parties, violations of electoral rules and heavy bureaucratic pressure on state-employed voters to support Mr Putin's party.
Russia is once more going through a transition, this time involving a new role for Mr Putin as a vaunted political leader rather than a capable manager of its economic recovery. The rest of the world must take due notice.