ASTANA, January 11 (RIA Novosti) - The leaders of Russia and Ukraine met Wednesday for the first time after a bitter dispute over natural gas prices were resolved in early January.
Vladimir Putin praised the results of talks with his Ukrainian counterpart, Viktor Yushchenko, in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, where they had attended Nursultan Nazarbayev's inauguration as president earlier in the day.
"I hope that the talks will give a new boost to Russian-Ukrainian cooperation," Putin said. "Enriched with the new experience of resolving controversial issues, our relations have gained a new potential for future development."
"We are happy to state that in the long history of relations with Ukraine, we now have people in Kiev who do what they say," Putin said.
According to Putin, the new approaches to cooperation between Russia and Ukraine will strengthen energy security in Europe and will help create a common economic space on the continent.
Putin also said recent deal on prices for natural gas between the two countries was fair. He said that Russia had met Ukraine halfway when it agreed to pay for the transit of its natural gas at market prices.
Under the new gas deal, Gazprom will sell gas to Swiss-registered trader RosUkrEnergo, for $230 per 1,000 cubic meters. Ukraine will then buy gas from RosUkrEnergo for $95 per 1,000 cu m.
He also said the transition to the European gas price formula was more important than agreeing on a new price on gas supplies because while today it was $230 per 1,000 cu m, tomorrow it could rise or drop depending on the global market trends.
"And we will certainly agree [to lower the price], if it goes down," Putin said.
Putin also said Russia should boost cooperation with Ukraine in the scientific, health and humanitarian spheres. "I am absolutely convinced that we can reach serious progress in these spheres," he said.
Yushchenko said he had a positive view of his country's tense relationship with Russia over the last two months, and indicated he was optimistic about the future of bilateral relations.
"We have emerged with principles that are comprehensible, transparent and clear," he said, adding that the two countries had gone through one of the most complicated periods in their histories.
He also said Ukraine would honor its commitments to both Russia and the West.
"Ukraine will not violate a single letter of our agreements with either Russia or [our] Western partners," he said, before adding that the Ukrainian parliament's decision to dismiss the government Tuesday had not been connected with the gas agreement.
The leaders of Russia and Ukraine also discussed the fate of the Sevastopol base, leased by the Russian Black Sea Fleet, in the Ukrainian autonomy of the Crimea.
Although the two countries have an agreement under which Russia will lease the base until 2017, some Ukrainian politicians sought a revision of the contract terms after Russian energy giant Gazprom announced that it wanted to raise prices for supplies of natural gas to Ukraine to market levels.
Yushchenko himself, who even in December ruled out revising the terms, said Wednesday: "We have reached agreement that the relevant committee will discuss all the unsettled issues in January or February."
Yushchenko also said Russia and Ukraine were close to signing an agreement on the demarcation of the Kerch Strait, an area of water that became a flashpoint in relations in 2003, when the authorities in Russia's Krasnodar Territory started building a dam towards the Ukrainian island of Tuzla. Ukraine then saw the construction work as an "unfriendly" act that threatened its territorial integrity, as the dam was only hundreds of meters away from its state border.
According to Yushchenko, he and Putin had ordered a bilateral commission to reinvigorate work on agreeing the border between their countries in the Kerch Strait, and also to prepare an agreement on the Russian-Ukrainian border in the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.
The Ukrainian president also said he agreed with Putin that a trade and economic committee on the issue would start working in the first quarter of the year and a cooperation committee, chaired by the prime ministers of the two countries, would start working in the second quarter.
Kiev wants the new border between the countries to be the same as the administrative border established between Russia and Ukraine in the 1950s, when the Crimean peninsula was made a part of the latter.
