US envoy meets Poroshenko as concerns for Ukraine grow

Washington's UN ambassador was set Wednesday to meet Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko at a time of renewed hostilities with pro-Russian fighters and fears of the Western-backed state's imminent debt default.

Samantha Power's show of support for Poroshenko's embattled team will also see her speak to Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin and senior cabinet members. The avowed critic of Russia and promoter of the ex-Soviet state's budding alliance with Europe has scheduled a public appearance in Kiev Thursday.

Power's visit comes one year into a presidency Poroshenko has used to try to wipe out more than two decades of crippling corruption and anaemic economic performance that left successive administrations reliant on Russian help.
But his efforts have been both stuttering and increasingly unpopular. The 14-month war against eastern insurgents has waxed and waned depending on both sides' abidance by a series of broad truce and political dialogue agreements.

The latest ceasefire forged with France and Germany's help in February threatened to rupture last week as exchanges of artillery and rocket fire killed around 30 people living in towns straddling the twisting -- and hotly disputed -- line separating the two foes.

The violence has since subsided and appears to have returned to past levels of sporadic shelling that kill people daily in a conflict the United Nations estimates has already claimed nearly 6,500 lives.
But voter displeasure at the seemingly perpetual separatist conflict is being compounded by basic economic concerns.

The inflation rate has soared to more than 60 percent while government assistance -- to everyone from pensioners to war veterans and students -- has been slashed under the advice of an IMF team overseeing Ukraine's long-term recovery plan.

- UN peacekeepers -

But the International Monetary Fund is still holding back loans it had earmarked in a $17.5-billion rescue due to Kiev's inability to agree debt restructuring terms with its private lenders or plug holes in its cash-draining state energy firm.
Ukrainian Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko warned that Kiev may be forced to freeze its private debt payments within a matter of weeks.

That decision would make the possibility of the IMF dispensing its next $1.7-billion (1.5-billion-euro) loan payment even more remote.

Washington and other political analysts view Power one of US President Barack Obama's diplomatic attack dogs on Russia whose terse exchanges at the United Nations with her Moscow colleague have been satirised and condemned on Kremlin-run TV.
"Let us pull the veil away from (Russian President Vladimir) Putin's peace plan and call it for what it is -- a Russian occupation plan," she told the UN Security Council in January.

Power has since strongly defended the waves of sanctions that Washington and Brussels have adopted in the response to Putin's annexation of Crimea and alleged military intervention in Ukraine's industrial southeast.

But Ukrainian leaders are keenly aware that past financial and other restrictions against Russia appear to have done little to alter Putin's stance.

A threat by G7 leaders on Monday to possibly toughen restrictions against Moscow drew an acerbic response from Putin's powerful administration chief.

"It is is perfectly logical to assume  that Russia will extend its own sanctions," Interfax quoted Sergei Ivanov as saying.

Kiev analysts said Poroshenko might try yet again to convince Power that Washington should back the deployment of UN peacekeepers in the war zone -- a step rejected by Russia and looked upon sceptically by the West.

"I think this is a gesture of US good will," political analyst Oleksiy Golobutsky told AFP.

"But I doubt that we should expect any tangible results," he added.