Obama meets Ukraine's president-elect

President Barack Obama met Ukraine's president-elect Petro Poroshenko on June 4, in a show of U.S. support for Ukraine's right to chart its own future, before an encounter with Russia's Vladimir Putin.

Obama sat down with Poroshenko in Warsaw, during a trip designed to assuage security concerns in eastern Europe following Russia's annexation of Crimea and what Washington says is an effort to destabilise Ukraine. 

The talks on day two of Obama's European tour will come after the president met central and eastern European leaders in Warsaw and before he heads to a G7 summit in Belgium which is designed to cement Western policy towards Russia. 

Obama will come face to face with Putin during 70th anniversary commemorations of the D-Day landings in Normandy, France on June 6.  

The leaders of Britain, France and Germany will go a step further and hold one-on-one talks with Putin.

The accelerating diplomacy over Ukraine comes as a seven-week pro-Russian insurgency in Ukraine's eastern rust belt grows only more violent after Poroshenko swept to power in a May 25 presidential ballot.

Hundreds of separatist gunmen on June 3 attacked a Ukrainian border guard service camp in the region of Lugansk on the border with Russia.  Obama said June 3 that U.S. commitment to eastern European security was absolute. "Our commitment to Poland's security as well as the security of our allies in central and eastern Europe is a cornerstone of our own security and it is sacrosanct," Obama said after inspecting a joint unit of Polish and U.S. F-16 pilots.

He proposed a "European Reassurance Initiative" of up to $1 billion (730 million euros) to finance extra US troop and military deployments to "new allies" in Europe.  NATO...