MOSCOW (AP) — Russian and Ukrainian presidents lavished praise on each other Friday for moving past the "degraded" relations that followed Ukraine's pro-Western Orange Revolution of 2004, but fell short of reaching any specific deals.
Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, making his first trip to Moscow since being sworn in last week, met with his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev in hopes of getting Russia to cut gas prices for his country.
Yanukovych’s deputy chief of staff, Anna German, told The Associated Press ahead of the visit that Ukraine "expected concrete agreements" from the visit. "This is not just a cordial visit, but a very pragmatic visit," she said in an interview last week.
But Medvedev limited himself to pledging a revival in "brotherly" ties while lamenting the "dark streak" in relations of the past five years.
Ukraine had been governed since 2005 by the Orange leaders, who had sought to break Ukraine out of Russia’s sphere of influence and join the European Union and NATO.
Moscow fumed over these efforts, and Medvedev refused last year to send an ambassador to Ukraine until President Victor Yushchenko, a harsh critic of the Kremlin, was out of office.
"Even when our country’s ambassador was not in Kiev, I would wake up thinking about Ukraine," Medvedev said. "Now we have fundamentally different possibilities… We will need to reanimate Russian-Ukrainian relations."
Yet Russia’s Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko said on the sidelines of the meeting that specific issues would not be resolved until Ukraine appointed a new prime minister. Analysts have tipped Yushchenko as a possible but unlikely candidate for that powerful post.
The government of Yulia Tymoshenko, the heroine of the Orange movement, was ousted Tuesday in a no-confidence vote initiated by Yanukovych’s party. Talks are under way to form a new majority coalition in Ukraine’s parliament that can nominate a new prime minister.
"We agreed that all issues, including gas, will be discussed with the Ukrainian government when it is formed," said Shmatko, who took part in Friday’s talks.
Tymoshenko signed a gas supply deal with Russia last January that obliged Ukraine to start paying European gas prices, which are much higher than it previously paid.
That deal ended one of several gas wars between Russia and Ukraine that took place under Yushchenko’s presidency and involved Russia’s cutoff of gas supplies to Europe via Ukraine.
Yanukovych now wants to renegotiate the gas deal that ended that dispute and bring Russian gas prices back below European levels. The Izvestia daily on Friday quoted Yanukovych’s ally Anatoly Kinakh, who is tipped to become Ukraine’s next fuel and energy minister, as saying that Ukraine wants to see gas prices cut by one-third.
Yanukovych signaled during his election campaign that he could repay the favor by offering Russia a role in managing Ukraine’s pipeline system.
But Russia’s gas export monopoly Gazprom said earlier this week that it had received no such offer yet. It said earlier that it saw no reason to review the deal signed last year, and Gazprom chief executive Alexei Miller was conspicuously absent from Friday’s talks.
Yanukovych was due to meet later Friday with Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who negotiated last year’s gas deal with Tymoshenko and is widely believed to continue calling the shots in Russia following his eight-year presidency.
