He said he was ready to meet Yushchenko in public. Yuriy Pavlenko, a pro-Yushchenko lawmaker, said Saturday that opposition leaders have been "unable to establish Satsyuk's whereabouts" since Wednesday, when parliament speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn told deputies that Kuchma had fired Satsyuk.
Ukraine's election strained relations between Russia and the West, with each accusing the other of interference, but Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov expressed confidence Saturday that the issue would not create a new divide.
"If somebody gets into his head the idea of building a new wall between Ukraine's eastern border and [Russia], I think that would just be such clearly recidivist Cold War thinking that most European countries, and the United States too, would rebel against it," Lavrov said on Moscow's TV-Tsentr.
Lavrov said Ukraine must be free to determine its future.
"We are not forcing friendship on anyone," he said. "We have no monopoly on the post-Soviet space, but ... we operate on the assumption that nobody else has such a monopoly, either."
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