WASHINGTON — The prime minister of Ukraine reassured President Obama on Monday that his embattled government was making
important progress in overhauling the country’s troubled economy and meeting
the terms of a shaky cease-fire with Russia.
Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, the prime
minister, said he told Mr. Obama that he was tackling corruption in Ukraine’s
crucial energy industry and working to increase wages. He also predicted that
Parliament would vote this week for constitutional changes to devolve more
power to local governments in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists
have waged a violent uprising. In an interview, Mr. Yatsenyuk said Mr. Obama had
pressed him on whether he would hold together his coalition with President
Petro O. Petroshenko. “I said, ‘Mr. President, once Benjamin Franklin said:
Hang together or hang separate,’” Mr. Yatsenyuk said. “That’s what we are doing
with the Ukrainian president. We will stay united.” He pledged that Ukraine
would not allow the coalition to fracture the way a previous pro-Western coalition
did.
The meeting between Mr. Yatsenyuk and Mr. Obama was
not on the president’s public schedule and was disclosed only afterward. In a
statement issued on Monday evening, the White House said Mr. Obama had dropped
by a White House meeting between Mr. Yatsenyuk and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and had offered his “unwavering support” for Ukraine
in the face of Russian aggression.
“The
president and vice president commended the government of Ukraine for the steps
it has taken to implement its obligations under the Minsk agreements, including
the submission to Ukraine’s Parliament of draft constitutional amendments on
decentralization,” the White House statement said. “The president and vice
president also welcomed the government of Ukraine’s ambitious economic reform
agenda.”
The constitutional changes may not
satisfy Russia, which agreed to pull back military forces as part of the
cease-fire negotiated in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, while pushing for more
power to be held by regional governors. But Mr. Yatsenyuk said that passing the
plan would put the onus on Moscow to fulfill the Minsk accord, which has so far
failed to settle the conflict and is widely expected to collapse within months.
“They won’t get any chance to blame Ukraine,” he said.
Mr. Yatsenyuk said that he did not care whether Russia
accepted the decentralization plan, and that President Vladimir V. Putin of
Russia would not have a veto over Ukraine’s Constitution. “It’s up to Putin to
decide whether he wants to escalate the situation or de-escalate the
situation,” he said.
Mr. Yatsenyuk came to Washington for the
second time in about a month in order to attend a business conference
co-sponsored by the Commerce Department and the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce. Ukraine’s economy
has been battered in part by the war in the country’s east, but also by years
of unbridled corruption, and one major question has been whether the new
government would be able or willing to fix it. The conference was a chance to
convince more than 150 American businesses that it is up to the task.
“It’s
a classic case of commercial diplomacy,” Penny Pritzker, the commerce
secretary, who addressed the gathering along with Mr. Biden, said in a
telephone interview. Ms. Pritzker praised the Ukrainian government and Mr.
Yatsenyuk in particular for what she said were substantial steps toward a more
open, less corrupt economy.
“They’ve passed anticorruption reform,
they’ve arrested some folks, they’ve begun the deregulation of the natural gas
market and dismantling monopolies,” she said. “They seem to be holding
themselves to deadlines.”
But previous Ukrainian governments have
tried and failed, and Ms. Pritzker acknowledged that the task was enormous. “It’s a complicated place,” she said.
“We recognize that they have a lot of work to do. But here’s a government
that’s committed to taking its economy back.”
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