MOSCOW: Ukraine's new President Viktor Yanukovych pledged Friday to make a dramatic improvement in his country's ties with Russia in his first visit to Moscow since taking office last week.

"I see my task as ensuring that relations between Russia and Ukraine take a sharp turn in the right direction," Yanukovych said in a televised meeting with his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvdedev.

Russian-Ukrainian relations "should never be the way they were for the past five years," he added, referring to the chill in relations under his predecessor, Viktor Yushchenko.

"I hope very much that with the arrival of a new president in Ukraine, the relations between our two countries will acquire a qualitatively new dynamic," Medvedev said in the meeting, which took place at the Kremlin.

The two ex-Soviet countries had frosty ties over the past five years under Yushchenko, who sought to bring Ukraine into the NATO military alliance and regularly sparred with Moscow over the issue of natural gas supplies.