Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich has expressed confidence that his country will sign an association agreement with the European Union at the summit of Eastern Partnership in Vilnius in November. “For 20 years we have been trying to modernize the country,” he told the 10th Yalta Annual Meeting, organized by the Yalta European Strategy (YES) in partnership with the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, on Friday. “The core of our reforms is to move closer towards the European standards. We have made our partner relations with EU member-states stable and we hope for signing an association agreement with the EU. But the country’s modernization will not end after the November summit.” “Ukraine is sandwiched between two monsters - the European Union and Russia,” Yanukovich said. “And we do not want to contrast these two vectors of development. We want to unite them.”