Ukraine's new government on Monday cancelled plans to work towards NATO membership, according to local media reports.
President Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russia politician inaugurated into office in February, revoked a 2006 executive order charging Ukraine's government with preparing the military for eventual membership of the Atlantic alliance, DPA reported.
Yanukovych's predecessor, the pro-Western politician Viktor Yushchenko, was an outspoken proponent of bringing Ukraine into NATO as soon as possible.
Yanukovych on Monday was in Moscow for an Easter visit with Patriarch Kiril, head of the Russian Orthodox Church. He was scheduled to participate in "informal" talks with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Monday afternoon.
The Kremlin has long opposed the idea of Ukrainian membership in NATO, on the grounds that Kiev's participation in the alliance would directly threaten Russian national security.
Yanukovych's Monday order abolished a government commission organising Ukrainian state efforts to join NATO. He has called Russia a "natural ally of Ukraine ... with which we must have the best relations."
Russian troops will, for the first time since Ukraine became an independent state, participate in World War Two memorial parades in the Ukrainian cities Kiev and Sevastopol, the Interfax news agency reported on Monday, citing a Moscow statement by Russian colonel-general Aleksander Kolmakov.
Other Russia-friendly initiatives pushed by Yanukovych since becoming Ukraine's president include a repeal on a Yushchenko-era ban on the use of the Russian language by some Ukrainian government agencies, and the cancellation of a Yushchenko executive order making Stepan Bandera, a World War II anti-Soviet partisan, an official Ukrainian hero.
Bandera was a terrorist responsible for the deaths of possibly hundreds of Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews, according to Kremlin historians.
Most Ukrainians oppose the idea of joining NATO, which is frequently seen in the former Soviet republic as a former Cold War enemy, and an organisation responsible for conducting unlawful military operations in Serbia and Afghanistan.
Opinion on ethnic Ukrainian partisans fighting during World War II is more divided, with some supporting Moscow's view that Bandera and his supporters were criminals, and others seeing them as fighters for Ukrainian independence.
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