U.S. Vice President Joe Biden is expected to reaffirm Washington's support for Ukraine's pro-Western course in a series of meetings Tuesday with leaders and opposition representatives.
Ukraine’s leaders will be seeking reassurances that Washington’s efforts to jump-start strained relations with Moscow will not come at the expense of Kiev’s drive to join NATO and integrate with the West.
Moscow firmly opposes NATO membership for Ukraine and for Georgia, another pro-Western ex-Soviet republic, which Biden will visit Wednesday.
Biden will meet President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko on Tuesday as well as key opposition leaders, who all plan to participate in January’s presidential elections.
Yushchenko and Tymoshenko _ though allies in the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought Yushchenko to power _ are now bitter foes after falling out over a number of issues.
That has allowed Viktor Yanukovych, the Moscow-aligned president ousted in the 2004 regime change and who enjoys huge popularity in the Russian-dominant east of the country, to come back into the running for the January vote.
Russia, meanwhile, is watching Biden’s visit to its former Soviet backyard with keen interest, suspicious that Washington is out to block any moves in Ukraine and Georgia back toward dependence on Moscow, their former Soviet provider.
But the U.S. has repeatedly denied that it seeks to dictate who should rule in any democratic country, and Antony J. Blinken, Biden’s national security adviser, said in a conference call last week that “sovereign democracies have the right to … choose their own partnerships and alliances.”
An article in Tuesday’s influential Russian newspaper Kommersant said one of Biden’s potential aims was to persuade both Yushchenko and Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, who both face considerable popular opposition, to resign.
Saakashvili has vowed to see through his term, which ends in 2013.
