The European Union’s foreign ministers will be under intense pressure when they meet on Monday (10 February) to find responses to Ukraine’s financial difficulties as well as its political crisis, after the EU’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, announced this week that the EU is working on a package of emergency funding for Ukraine.

Ashton’s statement came three days after Russia suspended its offer of a bail-out to Ukraine, and she left the EU’s institutions scrabbling to cool Ukrainian expectations. Made in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that was published online on Sunday (2 February), her announcemernt constituted an early outcome of her decision to become more directly engaged in the EU’s response to the crisis.

Ashton, who visited Kiev in early December, has met Ukrainian government officials on three occasions in the past eight days and leaders of opposition parties twice. Štefan Füle, the European commissioner for the EU’s neighbourhood, was previously handling the EU’s day-to-day engagement with Ukraine.

Asked by the Wall Street Journal what short-term financial support the EU could provide Ukraine, Ashton said there would be two stages before the “much bigger challenge” of securing long-term support through the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych turned to Russia for financial support in December after baulking at the conditions set by the IMF, which included structural reforms and a rise in gas prices.

Ashton’s team says that, while the EU is now looking to provide more short-term support, “any support would of course be tied to structural reforms and IMF conditionality”.

On Monday (3 February), José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission’s president, said that the EU was not in a “bidding competition” for closer ties with Ukraine, and emphasised that the Commission had already last year prepared €610 million in anticipation of an agreement with the IMF.

Ashton has yet to announce new political proposals, though one opposition party leader, Vitali Klitschko, was reported yesterday as saying that Ashton had “assured us that the EU is ready to delegate high-level mediators”. The EEAS has not confirmed the offer.

EU officials and European diplomats have in recent weeks focused on working behind the scenes to encourage dialogue between the opposition and Yanukovych, with diplomats saying that the EU needs to involve the Council of Europe, a human-rights watchdog, and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which includes the US and the former Soviet states.

Much European effort has been directed at increasing individual, political and institutional accountability, including proposals to identify police officers more clearly, to establish a national commission to investigate allegations of torture, and to find dozens of protesters alleged to be missing after being seized by security agents.

European diplomats have also been proposing a medium-term phase of confidence-building and political stabilisation that would focus on establishing a structured form of national dialogue, and on ensuring that presidential elections currently scheduled for February 2015 are free and fair.

The difficulties that the EU faces in encouraging cross-party dialogue in Ukraine while also promoting the accountability of those in power was highlighted on Monday (3 February) when Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s foreign minister, said that he believed that “we must now show sanctions as a threat” to Ukrainian officials. On Tuesday (4 February), the Ukrainian government summoned Germany’s ambassador to deliver a protest.