Ukraine aligns with Moscow as EU summit fails

A six-year campaign to lure Ukraine into integration with the EU and out of the Kremlin's orbit failed on Friday when President Viktor Yanukovych refused to sign a pact at a summit in Lithuania.

Ten days of high-stakes brinkmanship that brought a clash between Russian and other European countries ended with the Kremlin on top, for now, although all sides were careful to leave options on the table.

Yanukovych attended the Vilnius summit under pressure to reverse last week's sudden decision to shelve a political association agreement and a free-trade pact with the EU, accords that have been negotiated for six years and were to have been the centrepiece of a meeting attended by European heads of government.

"We expected more," Angela Merkel told Yanukovych in a private conversation that was filmed and released by the Lithuanian hosts.

Yanukovych remained poker-faced while pleading his case. He was under irresistible pressure from Vladimir Putin, with whom he held secret talks a fortnight ago, to forego the EU pact.

"We have big difficulties with Moscow," he said. "I have been alone for three-and-a-half years in very unequal conditions with Russia."

The U-turn last week "surprised and disappointed" top EU officials. In September Armenia also suddenly ditched years of talks aimed at integrating with the EU in favour of offers from Moscow.

The Ukrainian failure came as a dismal climax to a decade of efforts at semi-integration with neighbours to the east and around the Mediterranean, offering trade and financial benefits in return for democratic reforms while falling short of the magnetic attraction of EU membership.

Pro-European demonstrators who have been protesting in Kiev since last weekend were met on Friday by thousands of Yanukovych supporters, many of them bussed in.

A group attacked two journalists from a Ukrainian TV station who were filming in a city centre park. "Some 10 to 15 hands clung to my hood. They were beating me everywhere on the body. I was trying to defend myself," said Dmytro Gnap, one of the victims.

Over Friday night police in Kiev broke up the remnants of the anti-government demonstration, swinging truncheons and injuring many, news agencies and witnesses said. Riot police used teargas when they dispersed the crowd of about 400 protesters.

While senior officials agree Moscow has been blackmailing Yanukovych into rejecting the Brussels offer, the Ukrainian president was also given short shrift.

"If you blink in front of Russia, you always end up in trouble," Štefan Füle, the EU enlargement commissioner, told the Carnegie Europe thinktank. "Yanukoych blinked too soon."

The British ambassador to Ukraine, Simon Smith, called Yanukovych's decision "an egregious piece of cynicism".

Kiev is seen to be trying to play the EU off against Russia. Leaders dismissed Yanukovych's proposals that Moscow be involved in the negotiations.

Calling it the "most ambitious" agreement ever offered to a non-member state, José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, said that Moscow could not be handed a veto over sovereign Ukraine's relations with Europe.

"The Ukrainian people should be disappointed," said the summit host, President Dalia Grybauskaite of Lithuania. "Today's Ukrainian leadership has chosen a way which is going nowhere."

Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European council, said: "The offer is still on the table."