A cartoon Theatre of sanctions by Obama depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Ukrainian President Poroshenko is displayed during the opening ceremony of political cartoons exhibition ‘No filters’ in Moscow yesterday.
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Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko backed rival Arseniy Yatseniuk as future premier yesterday, to “unite” the country after it secured a deal with Moscow on future gas supplies. |
However Kiev seemed helpless in the face of next Sunday’s elections organised by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, decried by the West and welcomed by Moscow as the region continues to drift closer to its orbit.
“I have proposed that the Petro Poroshenko Bloc put forward Arseniy Yatseniuk to the post of prime minister,” Poroshenko wrote on Twitter after meeting with his party.
He later added that his choice was dictated by the “need for the country to unite” in order to implement reforms and push Ukraine along a path towards European integration.
Yatseniuk’s People’s Front has a narrow lead over Poroshenko’s party according to a near final count of Sunday’s parliament elections, an unexpected result that has led some observers to wonder if Kiev could become paralysed by rivalry between its leaders.
Ukraine’s election commission said that while 99.74% of votes have been counted, the final make-up of the Verkhovna Rada remains unclear as half of the deputies are chosen by a first-past-the-post constituency system.
The presidency said on the website that the Poroshenko Bloc has secured a total of 150 seats out of 450.
The number for the party of Yatseniuk, Ukraine’s chief negotiator at global financial institutions, is not yet known.
Poroshenko’s aim is a strong pro-European coalition in parliament that can implement direly needed reforms as the war-ravaged country is faced with financial ruin and a conflict with pro-Russian rebels that has killed over 3,700 people in the east.
However he has been unable to stop the separatist “people’s republics” in eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions from slipping away and holding their own polls on November 2 in order to boost legitimacy of their separatist leadership.
“These elections are important because they will give legitimacy to our power and give us more distance from Kiev,” said the election commission chief of the Donetsk People’s Republic Roman Lyagin, describing negative reactions from the West as “not constructive”.
About 2mn ballots have been printed ahead of the polls, and some 34,000 have already voted over the Internet, Lyagin told a news conference.
Moscow this week vowed to recognise the rebel polls, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying he expects them to “go ahead as agreed”.
New Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg warned Moscow yesterday against such recognition, adding that statements like Lavrov’s “show that Russia continues its efforts to destabilise Ukraine”.
Kiev and the West have accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of sending troops across the border to help the rebels – charges that Moscow denies.
Yesterday Poroshenko together with French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Putin not to recognise the polls.
In the agreement published by Ukraine’s government, Kiev must pay the first tranche of its debt ($1.45bn) before any gas deliveries are resumed and the full amount of $3.1bn by the end of the year in order to receive gas in 2015.
