You're reading: Yatseniuk: Ukraine to sign deal with EU within weeks

 Ukraine will sign the political part of an association agreement with European Union within the next few weeks, according to Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk, with the free trade agreement coming later.

On March 6, Yatseniuk participated in a European Union summit in Brussels
and discussed the conditions and terms for signing.

“We are now making technical consultations to agree about the date. (German
Chancellor) Angela Merkel told me that it is the matter of weeks now,” Yatseniuk
said, speaking to journalists on March 7 in Kyiv. “This is the most
important decision that the whole country has been waiting for. This is what
people were going to the streets for.”

As for the free trade deal, Yatseniuk said that EU is
willing to complete its side of the deal – to open the European market for
Ukrainian-produced goods – anytime now.

 “They said they are opening the market, they took this
decision unilaterally. We just need to sign it,” Yatseniuk said. “As for the opening
of the Ukrainian market for goods from EU, we are going to hold additional
consultations about it to make sure Ukrainian manufacturers are protected from
risks.”

At the summit, EU officials have also confirmed their
commitment to liberalize the visa regime with Ukraine, Yatseniuk said. This
will eventually lead to cancelling visas for Ukrainians traveling to EU
countries, according to Yatseniuk. However, he couldn’t say when the visas can
be cancelled.

Yatseniuk said he was impressed with the solidarity
and support that EU officials showed to him.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in the whole
history of our relations with EU,” he said.

Ukraine was expected to sign the agreement and free trade deal with EU on Nov.
28 last year at the EU summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.

But then-President Viktor Yanukovych, who abandoned the presidency on Feb.
21 and eventually fled to Russia, and the government backed out a week before
the deal, on Nov. 21. That sparked the anti-government street protests that
ended in ousting Yanukovych in late February.

On his way to Brussels on March 5, Yatseniuk was
spotted in Kyiv’s Boryspil airport waiting for his economy class flight. A
witness posted a photo of Yatseniuk in the airport to Facebook and it went
viral. Journalists asked if he and other members of the new post-revolution
government will always use regular flights instead of state jets.

“Where there are regular flights, (using state jets)
is out of the question,” Yatseniuk confirmed.

 Kyiv Post editor Olga
Rudenko can be reached to [email protected]