Chernomyrdin plays the Kyiv game (11/24/96)

Chernomyrdin plays the Kyiv game

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, like his ailing boss, President Boris Yeltsin, has now also played the game "now I am going to Kyiv, now I am not."

Mr. Chernomyrdin was scheduled to be in Kyiv sometime before November 15 to finalize papers on the Black Sea Fleet and prepare documents for a comprehensive treaty on friendship and cooperation between Ukraine and Russia. On October 1 he had announced, soon after a meeting with Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma, that he would be in Kyiv in mid-October, plans that were delayed for a month when President Yeltsin's heart surgery was postponed.

The new date came and passed without a visit, and no one in the Ukrainian government would comment except to say, "the plan is for the prime minister to travel to Kyiv." These were the words of President Kuchma's chief of staff, Dmytro Tabachnyk, uttered on November 23 at a regular presidential press briefing.

On November 20 the Kremlin finally responded to the status of the visit. According to an Interfax report, presidential foreign policy aide Dmitri Riurikov said, "Progress on the Black Sea Fleet issue will take time and is the determining factor on a visit." He said no new date has been set.

The presidential aide went on to say that "thus far no close political, economic and military-political unity is visualized for the near term."

Mr. Riurikov said the Black Sea Fleet should have a single base in Sevastopol and that "we are working on that issue."

The presidential aide also said Ukraine-Russia relations have been marked by controversy for centuries, but that "we are going to have a greater degree of closeness than we have now."