Ukrainian leaders emerged satisfied from back-to-back negotiations with visiting high-ranking delegations from the United States and Russia, having succeeded in presenting a friendly face to the country's two most important foreign partners.
U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was in Kyiv on April 14 to deliver a new message of support to President Leonid Kuchma. According to Albright, Ukraine can count on continued U.S. support – provided the government steps up the pace of economic reform.
'The more resolute the program of reforms, the stronger our support will be,' Albright told a press conference in Kyiv after meetings with Kuchma, Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko, and Foreign Minister Borys Tarasiuk.
Albright's trip came on the heels of a series of visits to Kyiv by high-level U.S. officials earlier this year, which signaled the increased attention the United States has started to pay to Ukraine since Kuchma won re-election last fall and announced a new economic reform drive.
Earlier this year, the U.S. singled out Ukraine along with Colombia, Indonesia and Nigeria as nations that the United States would give special attention in 2000.
'I believe at this stage, after this election of President Kuchma, there is momentum for reform,' Albright said.
Albright's visit was important for Ukraine in terms of restoring its international reputation – damaged heavily by recent allegations of misuse of International Monetary Fund aid – and setting the stage for negotiating more Western assistance to pay off foreign debts falling due this year.
During Albright's trip, Ukrainian officials reiterated their commitment to the pro-Western market reform course and used the opportunity to ask for U.S. assistance for two other important domestic projects.
Kuchma specifically repeated his earlier pledge to shut down the Chernobyl nuclear power plant by the end of the year – as soon as the West provides the funding needed.
He also asked the U.S. government to consider financing the completion of an oil pipeline from Odessa to the town of Brody in western Ukraine.
Kyiv wants to complete the pipeline to transport oil from rich Caspian Sea oil deposits in Azerbaijan to Central and Western Europe, as well for own needs, in order to be able to reduce its huge energy dependence on Russia.
Ukraine's mounting debt to Russia for energy supplies, especially natural gas, were high on the agenda of Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Kyiv, which came four days after Albright's trip.
The sides exchanged new pledges to strengthen bilateral cooperation, but gave no indication that they had found a solution to the gas debt problem and other issues dividing the two neighbors.
'We will consider everything that has been created so far as a good base for developing Ukrainian-Russian relations,' Putin said at the end of his meeting with Kuchma on April 18.
Kuchma said he was 'deeply satisfied' with the talks, adding that Putin's visit to Kyiv – the last leg of his first foreign trip as Russian president that also took him to Great Britain and Belarus – had a highly symbolic meaning.
'Despite a series of problems in Russian-Ukrainian relations … we found a way today to solve them in the future,' Kuchma said.
Apart from the gas debt, which Ukraine estimates at $1.4 billion but Russia says is more than $2 billion, Russia has also repeatedly accused Ukraine of stealing Russian gas from export pipelines headed through Ukraine to European markets.
Kuchma blamed unspecified domestic gas companies for the thefts, promising to stop 'those self-willed gas people inside Ukraine who are even re-exporting [Russian] gas to neighboring countries.'
Amid heavy security, Putin and Kuchma visited Sevastopol later on April 18 and boarded the flagships of the Black Sea Fleet's Russian and Ukrainian parts in a show of friendship. Putin also met with fleet officers and presented some with medals.
The division of the once united Black Sea Fleet was a major thorn in the Ukrainian-Russian relations for years after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The two states finally signed an agreement splitting up the fleet in 1997. (Material from AP and Reuters was used in this report)
