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Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, left, invites Russian Boris Yeltsin to start talks after a welcome ceremony in front of the Mariinsky Palace in Kiev Friday, May 30, 1997. Yeltsin paid a visit to Ukraine, the first since the Soviet collapse, to clinch a major rapprochement between the two ex-Soviet republics, linked by more than millennium of often painful ties. (KEYSTONE/AP photo/str)