Visiting Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko on Wednesday said here after meeting his French President Jacques Chirac that Paris backs his country's ambition for membership of the European Union (EU) amid crisis after French and Dutch rejection to the EU constitution and failure of the last week EU summit on the bloc's 2007-2013 budget.

France "supports Ukraine's European aspirations and its wish to join the World Trade Organisation (WT0)," he told a news conference after the 90 minute meeting at the French presidential Elysee Palace.

"We are Europeans, the status we are given doesn't matter," Yushchenko said.

"But without Ukraine Europe will not be complete, and less interesting," he said in a reference to his ambitions for European Union membership one day.

Earlier in the day Yushchenko said in an interview with the French right-wing newspaper Le Figaro that he was optimistic that the current crisis in the EU would not deter the bloc from future enlargement to the east.

"I am persuaded that with time, things will calm down and the European project will get a second wind," Yushchenko told Le Figaro.

"In addition, I am convinced that Europe cannot be reduced to the European Union. Ukraine is an ambitious country, and I don't want to waste my time in demonstrating that the Ukrainians are also Europeans," he said.

"History reminds us that we have always been an integral part of the continent. No one has the right to exclude or not to exclude this or that country," he added.

Chirac's spokesman Jerome Bonnafont said the French president said "he understood the aspiration of Ukraine to go towards Europe " and "wanted cooperation to develop in this respect on both the European and bilateral levels."

He also confirmed that Paris backed WTO membership for Ukraine.

According to the Ukrainian president, an action plan is expected to be worked out in two or three weeks to strengthen cooperation in the energy field, including gas, oil and nuclear and an energy conference is schedured for September in Kiev with participation of major French companies.

Yushchenko, 51, took power in the strategic ex-Soviet republic after winning a protracted presidential election during last year's "orange revolution".

During his one-day visit to France, he also went to the town of Senlis, 60 kilometres north of Paris, to inaugurate the memory of a Kiev-born French queen Anne of Kiev, who married King Henri I of France in 1051 and lived out the end of her life in Senlis.

Source: Xinhua