Bush Welcomes Yushchenko
You can find President Bush's welcome statement to Yushchenko here on the White House website. [thanks Action Ukraine Report]
The most important bits of the speech that I can see:
Starts off like this:
Thank you. It's an honor to stand with a courageous leader of a free Ukraine. Mr. President, you are a friend to our country and you are an inspiration to all who love liberty. Welcome to America, and we're pleased to welcome your wife, as well.and it doesn't get any less complimentary. As Kuzio says, the good days are back in US-Ukraine relations.
also:
- Bush has asked Congress to provide $60 million in aid to with the anti-corruption, pro-civil society efforts
- promises to work with the Ukrainian government on WTO and lift Jackson-Vanik
- sending a US official to Ukraine to talk about energy
- He appreciates Ukraine contribution to Iraq and thanks in advance for further support
- Repeated his talk about Ukraine's European choice
- spoke of the difficulties in the Ukraine his government is seeking to govern
- said nice things about helping efforts to stop proliferation of WMD
- talked about the joint statement he and Bush had signed (here on the White House site)
- Ukraine is looking forward to getting into WTO by the end of the
year, and looking forward to US support on ending trade sanctions
(read: Jackson-Vanik, again)
- Repeated US statements have said Ukraine's eventual pull-out from Iraq is OK. The first question Bush fields from a reporter is: Why should the United States continue to pay most of the cost and suffer most of the casualties when our allies are leaving? and I would recommend reading his response. He basically says "I understand, there's no hard feelings."
- It is very good news that Bush so bluntly stated that Jackson-Vanik would go in his opening remarks. For those who are not familiar, it is a piece of legislation left over from the cold war era that puts trade sanctions on Ukraine. I fervently hope it will be repealed by June. The author of this article in Slate goes into detail about the amendment and why it should be repealed. The article is OK, although connecting the trade sanctions to Eastern European problems with descrimination against Jews was an odd stretch. No matter, the important point is that they should go as quickly as possible, and this looks to be happening.
- NATO was totally sidelined; it wasn't even mentioned in the opening remarks. Of
course the reporters bring up the subject, but I give Bush points for
making a big deal about the WTO and talking about NATO only when
pressed. Yushchenko is trying to dance around the issue until his
government can sell the idea to the public, while Ukrainians currently
do not like the idea much at all. Zerkalo Nedeli found lots of talk but little action at the NATO summit
Bush refers to in his response to reporters. ZN explains the quiet over
NATO in this article with a Democratic Initiatives Fund poll saying 48%
of Ukrainians were against membership and only 15% for.
Therefore it was also good diplomacy that in Bush's response to the reporter, he quickly moved from talking about the importance of NATO membership to talking about how it will not conflict with eventual EU membership (which Ukrainians like a lot more). My thanks to Bush for a good bit of diplomacy.

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