Ukraine's parliament rejected Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk's resignation on Thursday and finally passed legislation he said was needed to finance an army offensive against a separatist rebellion in the east and avert a national default on its debts.
The assembly's about-turn on laws it refused to back a week earlier offers relief to Kiev's Western backers, who had feared Ukraine was sliding deeper into political chaos and might renege on an international bailout as it heads into an election period.
"There are two pieces of news today. The first is that Argentina has defaulted, and the second is that Ukraine has not defaulted and never will," Yatseniuk told the chamber, making clear he would stay in office.
The political battle has been taking place against the backdrop of a military campaign to win back parts of the Donbass region, which borders Russia, from the pro-Moscow rebels.
Having recaptured the rebel stronghold of Slaviansk in early July, government forces are now moving on the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, with the latter now all but encircled and electricity and food supplies cut off.
Both sides stopped shooting long enough for an initial group of international experts, after several days of trying, to reach the site where a Malaysian airliner came down in rebel-held territory in the east on July 17, killing 298 people on board.
The experts hope a larger team of investigators will also soon have access to the site to recover the remains of the last missing victims and look for evidence showing what brought the plane down.
Western leaders accuse the rebels of shooting it down and have imposed sanctions on Russia because they accuse it of arming the separatists, a charge Moscow denies.
There is scant hope of a quick end to the crisis, during which Moscow has annexed the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine, but envoys from Russia and Ukraine met in the Belarussian capital, Minsk, on Thursday with the Organization for Security and Cooperation.
Kiev said they had agreed to keep the route open to the crash site that was used on Thursday, signalling the rebels and government forces would try to use the road from Donetsk as a corridor even if fighting continued elsewhere.
REUTERS