KIEV URGES MOSCOW TO RESUME STALLED TALKS PROMPTLY.

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has again asked Moscow to reactivate the interrupted bilateral negotiations. Foreign Minister Hennady Udovenko said yesterday that Kiev has forwarded to Moscow specific proposals for a prompt "working meeting" of the foreign ministers, an early official visit to Moscow by Ukraine’s new prime minister Pavlo Lazarenko, a meeting of the high-level joint commission on economic cooperation, and an informal meeting of the two presidents August 9 when Leonid Kuchma will attend the inauguration of Boris Yeltsin’s second term of office. Kiev hopes that these talks would focus on differences over the Black Sea Fleet, the overdue interstate treaty, and trade issues. (Interfax-Ukraine, July 23)

Russia’s presidential election campaign interrupted the protracted negotiations on these issues. Even before Yeltsin’s second-round victory, and with redoubled insistence afterward, Kiev called for resuming the talks without delay and renewed its standing invitation to Yeltsin for an official visit. But Moscow last week restated its demand for exclusive naval basing rights in Sevastopol as a precondition to signing a bilateral political treaty, which would in turn have to precede a visit by Yeltsin to Ukraine.

Ukrainian Coal Strike Winds Down.