  It is shown that, in the theory of interacting Yang -Mills fields and a Higgs
field, there is a topological degeneracy of Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield
(BPS) monopoles and that there arises, in this case, a chromoelectric monopole
characterized by a new topological variable that describes transitions between
topological states of the monopole in the Minkowski space (in just the same way
as an instanton describes such transitions in the Euclidean space). The limit
of an infinitely large mass of the Higgs field at a finite density of the BPS
monopole is considered as a model of the stable vacuum in the pure Yang-Mills
theory. It is shown that, in QCD, such a monopole vacuum may lead to a rising
potential, a topological confinement and an additional mass of the $\eta_0$
meson. The relationship between the result obtained here for the generating
functional of perturbation theory and Faddeev-Popov integral is discussed.
