http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2014/06/ukraine-leader-fighting-must-end-this-week-2014693264696486.html

Ukraine leader: Fighting must end this week

Poroshenko, who was sworn into office on Sunday, says Ukrainian border must be restored to guarantee safety of citizens.

Last updated: 09 Jun 2014 05:22

Fighters and weapons have been crossing into Ukraine's east from Russia [EPA]

Petro Poroshenko, the newly elected Ukrainian president, says fighting in the separatist east of the ex-Soviet country must stop by the end of the week.

"We must end the fighting this week. For me, every day in which people die, every day in which Ukraine pays such a high price, is unacceptable," Poroshenko said in a statement published on his official website on Sunday.

"And to do that, we must restore the Ukrainian border so that the safety of each Ukrainian citizen is guaranteed."

His comments followed a round of talks with Moscow's ambassador to Kiev and an envoy from the Vienna-based Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and came a day after the 48-year-old confectionery tycoon was sworn into office as the fifth post-Soviet president of Ukraine.

Both fighters and weapons have been crossing into Ukraine's industrial rustbelt from Russia since shortly after the conflict began eight weeks ago.

Russian President Vladimir Putin issued orders on Saturday for security at the mutual border to be stepped up - a move demanded by both US President Barack Obama and several European heads of state.

In a separate development, Ukraine, Russia and European Commission officials will meet in Brussels on Monday evening to continue talks on how to resolve a dispute over gas prices.

The trilateral meeting, initiated by the Commission, is scheduled to start at 1700 GMT, with European Union Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak and Ukrainian Energy Minister Yuri Prodan in attendance.

http://www.dw.de/ukraines-new-president-poroshenko-leads-old-team/a-17687907

Ukraine's new President Poroshenko leads old team

The newly elected president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, has been sworn into office. During his campaign he promised "a new life" for the country. His team, however, consists largely of Yushchenko-era officials.

At the age of 48, Petro Poroshenko is the youngest of the five presidents who have held office in Ukraine since 1991. He is the first head of state in born into a generation of Ukrainians who grew up in the Soviet Union but made their careers career in an independent Ukraine. Unlike his predecessors, he speaks fluent English; he is also significantly richer, with an estimated wealth of more than a billion dollars.

Poroshenko will take office on Saturday (07.06.2014), two weeks after his victory in the presidential election.

The businessman owes his political rise to the popular movement that fought against corruption and pushed for Ukraine to strengthen its relations with the West. Last winter hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians protested on Kyiv's Maidan Square, demanding new faces in politics. Poroshenko was among the speakers on the stage, and he was listening carefully to the crowd's demands.

During his election campaign he promised Ukrainians "a new life" of prosperity - free of corruption. Apart from his promise to take back the Crimean peninsula from the Russians who annexed it, his election platform contained

Poroshenko served under both of the rival presidents that came before him

Proximity to the leadership

The owner of several successful candy factories, Poroshenko's political career began in 1998 when he entered the Ukrainian parliament as a representative of the United Social Democratic Party of Ukraine. Critics called the party a "club of oligarchs" because its leaders were rich businessmen. Poroshenko was also a founder member of the Party of Regions that was swept away by the Maidan movement.

Like other oligarchs in Ukraine, Poroshenko has always aimed to stay close to the country's leadership. He served the government in a number of positions, including as head of the Security Council and minister of foreign affairs under the pro-Western president Viktor Yushchenko, but never stayed in one office for very long. He also worked with Yushchenko's successor, the pro-Russian head of state Viktor Yanukovych, and for several months he was his minister of trade and economic development.

While Maidan protesters called for a political changing of the guard politics, Poroshenko's presidency seems to herald the return of Yushchenko's team - starting with the new president himself.

Poroshenko was more supportive of Yushchenko than nearly any other prominent business leader, before and especially during the 2004 Orange Revolution. The two are also close friends, and Yushchenko is godfather to Poroshenko's twin daughters.

Yushchenko's legacy

However, as Yushchenko is now very unpopular, Poroshenko avoided drawing attention to his friendship with the former president during the campaign. But a close look at his team quickly shows that Poroshenko has surrounded himself with officials from the Yushchenko era.

For example, Poroshenko's election campaign was planned by Ihor Hryniv. The 53-year-old member of parliament and former director of the Kyiv Institute for Strategic Studies was once Yushchenko's adviser. He later represented his party "Nasha Ukraina" (Our Ukraine) in parliament.

The 43-year-old foreign policy expert and diplomat Valeri Chaly was also part of Yushchenko's team. During Poroshenko's election campaign Chaly was in charge of foreign policy issues. The 60-year-old Roman Svarych is also back in politics: Yushchenko's former justice minister now consults with Poroshenko on legal issues.

Elsewhere in the country the picture is the same. Viktor Baloha, for example, was the head of Yushchenko's secretariat during his presidency. He headed Poroshenko's election campaign in the western Ukrainian province of Transcarpathia.

No parliamentary party

Poroshenko and Klitschko
Photo: REUTERS/Gleb Garanich

Poroshenko and Klitschko formed an alliance during the presidential vote

As president, Poroshenko will have less power than his ousted predecessor. The Ukrainian parliament passed an amendment to this effect in February. The true center of power is now the parliament and the cabinet it elects. Poroshenko has already announced that he will work with the current interim prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk of the "Batkivshchina" (Fatherland) party. Fatherland's chairman is the former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.

Poroshenko will also be relying on the recently elected mayor of Kyiv, the boxing champion Vitali Klitschko and his UDAR (Democratic Alliance for Reform) party. The two had already formed an alliance before the election. Klitschko has a strong parliamentary party and while Poroshenko founded a party of his own party, "Solidarnist" (Solidarity) in 2001, it more or less exists only on paper.

But Solidarity has seen recent growth thanks to Poroshenko's newfound popularity. Opinion polls show it leads the field with around 17 percent. Poroshenko has said he wants parliamentary elections to be held this year, and hopes that his party will emerge as the winner of the ballot.

Yuri Stetz and Yuri Lutsenko should be able to help him with that. Stetz, 38, headed Poroshenko's television channel, Channel 5, for more than 10 years. In the summer of 2013 Stetz, a member of parliament, was elected chairman of the Solidarity Party. Lutsenko, 49, was Yushchenko's minister of the interior, was imprisoned under Yanukovych, and campaigned on behalf of Poroshenko. Both are experienced politicians - not exactly the new faces the was calling for just a few months ago.

Itar Tass......

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko

MOSCOW, June 09. /ITAR-TASS/. Kremlin believes that work of the contact group on peace settlement in Ukraine’s east may be about to bear fruit in days, Russian presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov told ITAR-TASS on Monday.

“Experts are working on the problem in the context of the short conversationthat (Russian president Vladimir) Putin and (Ukrainian President Petro) Poroshenko held in Normandy (on June 6),” he said, adding that first definite steps of the group’s work could take place “in the next days”.

The contact group on peace settlement in Ukraine’s east met for the first time on Sunday with Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s Ambassador to Germany Pavlo Klimkin, the OSCE Secretary General’s special envoy Ambassador Heidi Tagliavini and Russia’s Ambassador in Kiev Mikhail Zurabov taking part in it.

Opening the meeting, Poroshenko said that he believed it necessary to bring gunfire in the country’s eastern regions to an end in a week’s time.

BRUSSELS, June 09. /ITAR-TASS/. Controversy over the South Stream underwater gas pipeline project from Russia to Bulgaria is unlikely to feature on sidelines of today’s ministerial meeting between Russia, Ukraine and the European Union in Brussels, European Commission spokeswoman Sabine Berger told ITAR-TASS on Monday.

The issue was not likely to be discussed, neither were there plans for a meeting of the Russia-EU project expert group, she said.

Berger said the European Commission welcomed the Bulgarian government’s decision to suspend pipeline construction in response to the commission’s request last week.

She said the commission had complaints about the project's conformity with the norms of the EU's regulatory “third energy package”. Brussels also suspected Bulgaria of “breaking European rules for holding tenders for infrastructure construction projects” and of granting “preferential possibilities for Russian and Bulgarian companies”.

CEO at Naftogaz of Ukraine Andrei Kobolev

MOSCOW, June 09. /ITAR-TASS/. Ukraine has increased the volume of natural gas in its underground facilities to 12.6 billion cubic meters, which is 68% of the storage to guarantee smooth transit in winter.

Gas Storage Europe (GSE) reports Ukraine’s underground gas storages are filled by 39%. Under the current gas price of $485.5 per 1,000 cubic metres, Naftogaz has pumped within a week 867 million cubic meters of gas worth $420.9 million.

Naftogaz of Ukraine’s Andrei Kobolev said earlier that Ukraine did not have sufficient financing to pump into the underground storages the Russian natural gas at the price of $485.5.

Ukraine has twelve underground gas storages with the capacity of about 31 billion cubic meters. They make a part of Ukraine’s gas supplying and transporting system.

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2014/06/ukraine-opens-talks-with-russia-new.html

Sunday, June 08, 2014 12:57 PM

Ukraine Opens Talks with Russia; New President Promises Peace Making Efforts; Bombing of Slavyansk Continues Anyway

The Financial Times reports Poroshenko opens talks with Russia.

Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s new president, has opened talks with Russia on restoring peace in two breakaway eastern provinces a day after taking office, vowing to negotiate an end to the three-month-old pro-Russian insurgency.

Mr Poroshenko took part on Sunday in a three-member “working group discussion” on a proposed peace plan with Mikhail Zurabov, Russia’s ambassador to Ukraine, and a representative of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, Iryna Friz, a spokeswoman for the Ukrainian president said.

The opening of dialogue came a day after the billionaire oligarch took office with a promise to “ensure lasting peace” in the country’s breakaway eastern Donetsk and Lugansk provinces, and on the same day that Ukraine’s military pummeled rebel positions in a heavy assault on the separatist-controlled city of Slavyansk.

Pro-Russian rebels, who fired back with machine guns and heavy artillery, said that an unspecified number of civilians in the city were injured or killed. Explosions were heard, some buildings caught fire, and columns of thick black smoke rose over the town on Sunday afternoon.

In his first speech as president on Saturday, the billionaire oligarch sounded a more emollient tone on making peace with the rebels than the uncompromising line favoured by his caretaker predecessors, who took power after February’s pro-Europe Maidan revolt.

Mr Poroshenko promised to allow easterners free use of the Russian language and move forward with a plan to decentralise government – core separatist demands – and the holding of new local elections in the east.

Peace Making

Peace making talk is off to a rather disingenuous start to put things mildly. Please consider Battles under way near Ukraine's Slavyansk and Kramatorsk.

Shooting resumed Sunday morning in the area of Slavyansk and Kramatorsk, the headquarters of Slavyansk self-defense forces told RIA Novosti. "Battles are now under way on the outskirts of Kramatorsk, in the area of the Yasnogorovsky state farm, as well as on the outskirts of Slavyansk, near the Mashmet," the militia informed.

The Ukrainian army continues to bombard Slavyansk (the centre and the districts of Artem and Vostochny), and its suburbs - Yampil and Semyenovka. The security forces use mortars and self-propelled launchers Tulip.

Images of Slavyansk

Reader Dmitriy provided a link these Images of Slavyansk.