KIEV, Aug. 21 - President Petro Poroshenko said on Thursday he would call on Russian President Vladimir Putin to rein in pro-Russian separatists when the two men meet next week.

“I am confident we can achieve that," the president said in the course of a working visit to Mykolaiv.

"Ukraine strives for peace,“ he said. "The whole world is tired of war."

"We are capable of defending our sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity. Today, we are fighting for the independence of Ukraine. We will certainly win," Poroshenko said.

"To have a strong negotiating position on peace, we must be strong, have the unity of people, a powerful country and a strong army," he said.

Poroshenko spoke as government forces, despite taking heavy losses themselves, thrust deeper into rebel-held territory in Ukraine's Russian-speaking east and kept the separatists whom they have battled since April on the back foot.

The Ukrainian battlefield successes, after a faltering start in April, have alarmed some Western governments who fear they could box Putin dangerously into a corner with no way out to save face.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is scheduled to visit Kiev on Saturday to show her support for Poroshenko - but diplomats say she is also bearing a message that he should consider calling a ceasefire so as not to incur a backlash from Putin.

Poroshenko, who will oversee emotion-charged Independence Day celebrations on Sunday in Kiev in which veterans from the eastern front will take part in a military parade, talked tough on Thursday.

Indicating he too had a political image to defend at home, he told local journalists that in talks in Belarus's capital of Minsk next Tuesday, at which he will meet Putin, he would "call for the (rebel) fighters to be withdrawn from Ukraine.”

"I am sure we will succeed in this," he said.
Kiev, supported by the United States and European allies, says Russia has orchestrated the separatists' rebellions in the Russian-speaking east, and armed them. Moscow denies this.

At the table in Minsk will also be Putin's partners in the Russian-led Customs Union, which beckoned unsuccessfully to Kiev to join, and a three-person delegation from the European Union, with which the new Kiev leadership sees Ukraine's future.

It will be the first meeting between Poroshenko and Putin since a frosty encounter in June in Normandy, France, and has raised prospects of a breakthrough to end a months-long geo-political confrontation as Ukraine has favored integration into mainstream Europe to the dismay of its former Soviet ruler.

The steady drip of government losses continued, with a military spokesman saying 16 members of Ukraine's interior ministry special forces had been killed in fighting overnight in the town of Ilovaisk near the main regional hub of Donetsk. (rt/ez)