Ukrainian president cancels Moscow visit

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych canceled his planned Dec. 18 visit to Moscow, just hours before his departure, after his team was unable to satisfy the Russian government’s political demands in exchange for lower natural gas prices, news reports said. These demands were based on the key, unbending condition that the Ukrainian government guarantee its full membership in the Customs Union. Within the Ukrainian government, an anonymous source told Interfax the visit was canceled “to find that formula by which joining separate conditions of the Customs Union charter that wouldn’t contradict the conditions of the initialized Ukraine-EU Association Agreement.” Meanwhile, the Russian government had documents prepared for signing without any scheduled time for serious negotiations, the Kommersant-Ukrayina newspaper reported. Russian President Vladimir Putin scheduled a 15-minute tete-a-tete, with the remainder of discussions involving ministers scheduled for after the signing. The negotiations leading up to the trip involved only the two nations’ presidential administrations, without their respective foreign affairs ministries, Kommersant said.