Ashton heading for Kiev

EU’s foreign policy chief will push for talks between opposition and government.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, will head tomorrow (10 December) to Kiev in an effort to reinforce the EU’s call for dialogue between the Ukrainian government and opposition.

The two-day visit comes at the initiative of José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission’s president, who spoke yesterday with Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych.

Today’s announcement came amid reports from Ukraine that police are preparing to make a renewed bid to clear demonstrators from the streets of the capital, Kiev.

There have been daily protests in Kiev since Yanukovych announced on 21 November that he would not sign trade and political agreements with the EU, citing economic pressure from Russia and arguing that the trade deal offered by the EU would ‘strangle’ Ukraine’s economy.

The first major attempt by police to end the demonstrations, on the night of 29 November, resulted in violent scenes and a call from the EU for a formal investigation. Demonstrations immediately swelled, with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians gathering in Kiev on the weekends of 30 November-1 December and 7-8 December.

Yanukovych last week agreed to launch an investigation into the police violence. Over recent days, the police have largely retreated from central Kiev. This helped to ensure that a major international gathering in Kiev, of foreign ministers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), passed off last week (5-6 December) without a repeat of the beatings meted out by police to demonstrators. Around 50 journalists have been injured since the protests began.

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The political director of EU’s foreign policy service, Helga Schmid, attended the OSCE meeting and, according to EU officials, met members of the government and opposition.

Ashton’s itinerary has yet to be confirmed, but she intends to meet Ukraine’s political leaders and representatives of civil society. Yanukovych, Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, Foreign Minister Leonid Kozhara and Volodymyr Rybak, the speaker of parliament, are likely to be among the officials that Ashton will seek to meet.

Ashton will not be accompanied by Štefan Füle, the European commissioner in principal day-to-day management of relations with Ukraine.

Yanukovych will tomorrow (10 December) meet three of his predecessors –Viktor Yushchenko, Leonid Kuchma and Leonid Kravchuk – in a bid to find a compromise.

The opposition has called on Yanukovych to resign and for new elections to be called.

The EU and Ukraine currently have two other lines of dialogue with Ukraine on issues related to the crisis.

A Ukrainian delegation is due to visit Brussels to discuss the trade and political deals offered by the EU to Ukraine, but no date and details have been released. Barroso has said that the EU will not re-negotiate the terms of the deals, but is prepared to talk about details of their implementation.

A two-man European Parliament mission continues to liaise with the Ukrainian authorities about the jailing in October 2011 of Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister and arguably still the most influential leader of the opposition. The EU has long said that her jailing was legally flawed and an example of politicised justice. Pat Cox and Aleksander Kwaśniewski, the Parliament’s envoys, have previously called on Yanukovych to grant her a partial pardon.