UKRAINE UNUSUALLY SUBDUED.

President Leonid Kuchma and Foreign Minister Hennady Udovenko appeared to regard this CIS summit as an opportunity to mend fences with Russia and nurture a personal relationship between Kuchma and Yeltsin. The Russian president used the opportunity to set a date in November for an informal meeting in the Russian countryside, to which Yeltsin had recently invited Kuchma. Yeltsin also assented to Kuchma’s proposal to invite Germany and France into the Russian-Ukrainian project to build the AN-70 transport plane, designed by Ukraine’s Antonov plant. Ukrainian leaders, however, are desperately seeking the removal of barriers to bilateral trade. Ukrainian exports to Russia dropped by 28 percent during the first eight months of 1997 compared to the same period last year. Only three days before the CIS summit, Kuchma charged in a speech to trade unionists that Moscow was conducting a "trade war that Ukraine can not stop." (Monitor, October 22; Ukrainian agencies, October 21)

Georgia’s Relations with Russia and CIS Turn on Abkhazia