U.S. Vice President Joe Biden met with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko on Tuesday to reaffirm Washington's support for Kiev's pro-Western course despite opposition from Moscow.
Ukraine’s leaders are seeking reassurances that Washington’s efforts to jump-start the United States’ 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.
Yushchenko welcomed Biden to Ukraine, calling it a “European country where democracy rules” in a not-so-veiled dig at neighboring Russia.
“We are going forward, we have chosen a European path,” Yushchenko told Biden at the start of the meeting. “There is a lot of homework to do, because sometimes it is very difficult.”
Reporters were ushered out of the presidential residence in Kiev before Biden began to speak.
Biden will meet Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko later Tuesday as well as key opposition leaders, who all plan to participate in January’s presidential election.
Yushchenko and Tymoshenko, allies in the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought Yushchenko to power, are now bitter foes after falling out over a number of issues. Their rivalry has prevented Ukraine from having an effective response to the global economic crisis.
That has allowed Viktor Yanukovych, the Moscow-backed presidential candidate who lost the 2004 election but is very popular in eastern Ukraine, to come back into the running for the January vote.
Biden will also meet with Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the reformist former parliament speaker, who also plans to run for president.
Russia, meanwhile, is watching Biden’s visit to its former Soviet backyard with keen interest, suspicious that Washington is out to make sure Ukraine and Georgia don’t fall back on being dependent 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.
“Sovereign democracies have the right to … choose their own partnerships and alliances,” Antony J. Blinken, Biden’s national security adviser, said last week.
U.S.-Russian relations sunk to a new low last summer as Russia and Georgia became embroiled in a war.
Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili has vowed to see through his term, which ends in 2013. But the opposition has demanded his resignation, accusing him of launching an unwinable war against Russia in August.
The Russian army rolled in after a Georgian attack on the breakaway province of South Ossetia failed to bring the province back under Tbilisi’s control. Thousands of Russian troops remain in South Ossetia and another separatist-held Georgian enclave, Abkhazia. Russia has recognized both regions as independent nations.
Washington said it did not support Georgia’s attempt to retake South Ossetia by force.
Saakashvili, who had committed thousands of troops for U.S.-led missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, pleaded for military support from Washington during the fighting, but the U.S. did not intervene.
