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Putin Drills Ground Troops at Ukraine’s Doorstep as U.S. Warns Against Intervention As Putin Orders Drills in Crimea, Protesters’ Clash Shows Region’s Divide
(about 7 hours later)
MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin ordered a surprise exercise of ground and air forces on Ukraine’s doorstep Wednesday, intending to demonstrate his country’s military preparedness at a time of heightened tensions with Europe and the United States over the turmoil gripping Russia’s western neighbor. The Obama administration said any Russian military intervention in Ukraine would be a costly and “grave mistake.” SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine — With cries of “Allahu akbar,” Arabic for “God is great,” thousands of protesters in the capital of Ukraine’s Crimea region, a tinderbox of ethnic, religious and political divisions, added an Islamic voice on Wednesday to the tumultuous struggle for Ukraine that last weekend drove the president from power and that has pushed Russia and the West into a face-off reminiscent of the Cold War.
Russia’s military put tens of thousands of troops in western Russia on alert at 2 p.m. for an exercise scheduled to last until March 3. The minister of defense, Sergei K. Shoigu, also announced unspecified measures to tighten security at the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet on Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula. Eight hundred miles away, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was ordering a surprise military exercise of ground and air forces on Ukraine’s doorstep on Wednesday, adding to the tensions with Europe and the United States and underscoring his intention to keep the country in Moscow’s orbit.
The orders came as thousands of ethnic Russians gathered outside the regional parliament in Crimea’s capital, Simferopol, to protest the political upheaval in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, that felled the government of President Viktor F. Yanukovych over the weekend and turned him into a fugitive. Crimea was a part of Russian territory until the Soviet Union ceded it to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine in 1954, and Russians there have already pleaded for the Kremlin’s intervention to protect the region and its population from Ukraine’s new leadership. Taken together, the two events illustrated the continuing challenges that the new government in Kiev faces in calming separatism at home and placating a frustrated Russian leader who sees Ukraine as a vital part of his strategy of rebuilding Russian influence along the lines not of the former Soviet Union but of the czars. While few analysts expected a Russian military intervention in Ukraine, most said Mr. Putin was likely to respond in some fashion to such a stinging geopolitical defeat.
“Crimea is Russian!,” some of the protesters screamed as brawls erupted with rival demonstrations by Crimea’s ethnic Tatars supporting the new interim authorities. The question was how, and on Wednesday he provided a first answer, when Russia’s military put tens of thousands of troops in western Russia on alert at 2 p.m. for an exercise scheduled to last until March 3. The minister of defense, Sergei K. Shoigu, also announced unspecified measures to tighten security at the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet on the Crimean Peninsula.
While the military maneuvers were largely seen as saber-rattling and not a precursor to armed intervention, they elicited new warnings from Western governments, notably the United States, which reminded Russia of its own admonishments to the West about big-power military adventurism. Russian military vehicles have been far more visible in recent days on the streets of Crimea, residents say, suggesting that Moscow, while probably not gearing up for armed conflict, wants to make its presence felt in this potentially volatile region, where it has a number of naval and other military facilities dating from the Soviet Union.
Speaking to a small group of reporters in Washington, Secretary of State John Kerry said it was important for the Russians “to heed those warnings as they think about options in the sovereign nation of Ukraine and I don’t think there should be any doubt whatsoever that any kind of military intervention that would violate the sovereign territorial integrity of Ukraine would be a huge - a grave mistake.” In a sign of heightened tension, road blocks flying Russian flags appeared Wednesday on the main thoroughfares leading to Sevastopol, a Crimean city dominated economically and politically by the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet. About 25 miles from the city center on the road from Simferopol, men in blue uniforms and others in green camouflage clothing stopped and inspected all vehicles. An armored personnel carrier, apparently Russian, was parked nearby.
Mr. Kerry did not specify what the United States was prepared to do in response to a Russian military intervention, focusing instead on what he said the Russians would sacrifice. General Shoigu announced the snap exercise during a meeting of Russia’s general staff members, citing the need to test the Russian armed forces’ readiness to respond to a “crisis situation.”
“I think it would cost them hugely in the world where they are trying to assert a sort of greater legitimacy with respect to their diplomacy,” he said. “That would blow it into shreds.”
But Mr. Kerry asserted that the United States did not see Ukraine a East-West battleground, saying:"This is not Rocky IV.”
Mr. Kerry also said the United States was considering a $1 billion package of loan guarantees to Ukraine to help address the deepening economic crisis there, as the interim leaders scrambled on Wednesday to form a new government able to find ways out of an impending default. They chose as prime minister Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, a veteran public official who has served as Parliament speaker, foreign minister, economics minister and acting head of the central bank.
The leaders also announced the dissolution of the country’s widely despised riot police force, the Berkut, whose officers were blamed for shooting demonstrators last week in Kiev’s central Independence Square.
“Berkut is gone,” the acting interior minister, Arsen Avakov, announced in a posting on Facebook.
General Shoigu announced the snap exercise during a meeting of Russia’s general staff, citing the need to test the readiness of Russia’s armed forces to respond to a “crisis situation,” including a terrorist attack involving biological or chemical weapons.
Senior defense and government officials later said the exercise was not related to the events in Ukraine, which officials here have watched with growing alarm, but they also said there was no reason to postpone them either, and the geopolitical message was clear.Senior defense and government officials later said the exercise was not related to the events in Ukraine, which officials here have watched with growing alarm, but they also said there was no reason to postpone them either, and the geopolitical message was clear.
The orders came as thousands of ethnic Russians gathered outside the regional Parliament in Crimea’s capital, Simferopol, to protest the political upheaval in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, that felled the government of President Viktor F. Yanukovych over the weekend and turned him into a fugitive. Crimea was Russian territory until the Soviet Union ceded it to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine in 1954, and Russians there have already pleaded for the Kremlin’s intervention to protect the region from Ukraine’s new leadership.
“Crimea is Russian!” some of the protesters screamed as brawls erupted with rival demonstrations by Crimea’s ethnic Tatars supporting the new interim authorities.
Determined to block the local legislature from heeding calls from pro-Russia activists for more autonomy and even secession from Ukraine, 5,000 Crimean Tatars, the region’s indigenous Turkic, Muslim population, traded taunts and occasional blows with protesters waving Russian flags.
After a peaceful start, the dueling rallies turned into a melee in the late afternoon. A couple of dozen Tatars broke into the legislative building, surging past riot police officers to confront anxious local legislators huddled inside.
“Where are the separatists?” screamed a furious Tatar activist, banging a wooden staff on the marble floor.
The anger of a Muslim community known for its peaceful ways and its general lack of interest in radical strains of Islam highlighted how the political tumult in Kiev has stirred a riptide of conflicting passions throughout a country of 46 million that is now struggling to stay together.
The military maneuvers were widely seen as saber-rattling by a Kremlin that has spent a decade or more trying to extinguish separatist sentiments in the North Caucasus and elsewhere. They nevertheless elicited new warnings from Western governments, notably the United States, which reminded Russia of its own admonishments to the West about its military interventions in Libya and other nations.
Speaking to a small group of reporters in Washington, Secretary of State John Kerry said it was important for the Russians “to heed those warnings as they think about options in the sovereign nation of Ukraine.”
Mr. Kerry did not specify what the United States was prepared to do in response to a Russian military intervention, focusing instead on what he said the Russians would sacrifice.
“I think it would cost them hugely in the world, where they are trying to assert a sort of greater legitimacy with respect to their diplomacy,” he said.
Mr. Kerry also said the United States was considering a $1 billion package of loan guarantees to Ukraine, as well as direct aid to the Ukrainian government, to help address the deepening economic crisis there.
Russia has refused so far to recognize the legitimacy of the new political powers in Ukraine’s Parliament, and denounced their actions since Mr. Yanukovych’s flight as inflammatory and divisive, including what the Foreign Ministry described on Wednesday as discrimination toward Russian Orthodox believers. Two days earlier Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev said the turmoil posed “a real threat to our interests and to our citizens’ lives and health.”
“I think it is flag waving, but it’s more than that also,” Dmitri Trenin, the director of the Moscow Carnegie Center, said after the announcement of the exercise. “It’s a message to Kiev not to impose its rule in Crimea by force.”“I think it is flag waving, but it’s more than that also,” Dmitri Trenin, the director of the Moscow Carnegie Center, said after the announcement of the exercise. “It’s a message to Kiev not to impose its rule in Crimea by force.”
Mr. Trenin warned that the exercise could have the opposite effect, rallying Ukrainians against Russia if the country’s territorial integrity appeared threatened. Mr. Putin himself has yet to make public remarks on the crisis in Ukraine, but senior officials have vowed not to interfere directly and called on the United States and Europe to do the same. Even so, the public clamor of ethnic Russians in Crimea and eastern Ukraine has raised fears that Russia could be provoked to intervene.
Russia has refused so far to recognize the legitimacy of the new political powers in Ukraine’s parliament, and denounced their actions since Mr. Yanukovych’s flight as inflammatory and divisive, including what the Foreign Ministry described on Wednesday as discrimination toward Russian Orthodox believers. Two days earlier Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev said the turmoil posed “a real threat to our interests and to our citizens’ lives and health.” The home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet for centuries and embedded deep in Russian culture thanks to the works of writers like Tolstoy, Crimea became part of Ukraine only in 1954, a transfer that made little difference at the time because both Ukraine and Russia belonged to the Soviet Union.
The Crimea has been a particular focus of concern among Russian lawmakers, many of whom share the sentiment that the region is culturally and historically Russian, not Ukrainian. The Black Sea Fleet maintains its headquarters in the port of Sevastopol under a lease that Mr. Yanukovych’s government extended until 2042 after a riotous debate in Ukraine’s parliament in 2010. Since Ukraine’s emergence as an independent state in 1991, many of the ethnic Russians who make up a majority of Crimea’s population have nursed dreams of returning to Russia’s fold, a goal that has gained a fresh wave of passionate support since Mr. Yanukovych’s ouster.
Mr. Yanukovych, the object of a nationwide manhunt in Ukraine, had been believed to be in hiding in Crimea after he bolted from Kiev on Saturday. Two Russian news agencies, citing unidentified sources, reported Wednesday night that he had arrived in Moscow. Other officials dismissed the reports. “I don’t want to live in a country run by fascists,” said Sergei Gaenko, a retired law enforcement official, echoing a widespread view here that Mr. Yanukovych’s ouster was engineered by the political descendants of militant Ukrainian nationalists who, during World War II, sometimes formed loose tactical alliances with Hitler’s invading army.
“I know definitely that Yanukovych is not in Russia,” said Mikhail V. Margelov, the chairman of the foreign affairs committee of Russia’s upper house of Parliament. Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said he had no information on Mr. Yanukovych’s whereabouts. Crimea, he added, was “illegally given to Ukraine” by Nikita Khrushchev and he said it was time to “correct an historic injustice.” Like many Russians here, he scorned the new interim government as made up of “Banderovtsi,” a derogatory Soviet term used to describe followers of Stepan Bandera, a wartime Ukrainian nationalist leader vilified by Moscow as a pro-Nazi traitor.
Mr. Putin himself has yet to make public remarks on the crisis in Ukraine, but senior officials have vowed not to interfere directly and called on the United States and Europe to do the same. Even so, the public clamor of ethnic Russians in the Crimea and eastern Ukraine has raised fears that Russia could be provoked to intervene. The minority Tatars, however, have little love for Moscow after being deported en masse by Joseph Stalin and, now back in their homeland, want to carve out their own space inside Ukraine.
“Such a scenario is impossible,” Valentina I. Matviyenko, the chairman of Russia’s upper house of Parliament, said on Wednesday, according to the Interfax news agency. “We have a long memory of what Russia did to us Tatars,” Refat Chubarov, a member of the Crimean Legislature and a Tatar community leader. Pro-Moscow members of the assembly, furious at the cancellation of an extraordinary session they had called to discuss a response to events in the capital, accused Mr. Chubarov of using a mob to derail democracy. Most people on both sides of the Russia-Ukraine divide have no interest in violent confrontation, but small militant groups have been increasingly active in trying to rally people for battle. In Sevastopol, Crimea’s biggest city, pro-Russian groups have been signing up residents for so-called “self-defense” units while hard-line Cossack organizations, recalling past campaigns to expand and secure Russia’s borders, denounced politicians who call for calm as cowards.
Russia’s military exercise will involve nearly 150,000 troops, including the entire Western Military District, one of four across the country, as well as hundreds of tanks and artillery batteries, and dozens of aircraft and ships, the deputy defense minister, Anatoly I. Antonov, said, according to Interfax. A small number of militant Tatars, encouraged by extremists abroad, have tried over the years to recruit Crimea’s Muslims for jihad, but their efforts have fallen flat. Any move to restore Crimea to Russian rule, however, would risk breathing life into such calls for extremism.
The district, headquartered in St. Petersburg, stretches along the border of northeastern Ukraine and includes the 6th and 20th Armies. The exercise will also involve the 2nd Army in the Central Military District, as well as airborne, aerospace and military transport commands. Mr. Antonov informed the military attachés of several nations of the exercise, including the United States, as required by an agreement negotiated in 2011 and known as the Vienna Document. That, among other reasons, is why few people, even in Russia, expect to see an intervention. “Such a scenario is impossible,” Valentina I. Matviyenko, the chairwoman of Russia’s upper house of Parliament, said Wednesday, according to the Interfax news agency.
Aleksandr Golts, an independent military analyst in Moscow, said that the exercise theoretically could — and he emphasized the word “theoretically” — disguise a more general mobilization of Russia’s military in case a conflict erupted over Ukraine.
“In my view it’s very bad, even if there are no plans to use the military, that maneuvers are being held with the goal of testing the nerves of others,” he said. “That these maneuvers will increase the tenseness of this situation — that is not even a question.”
Since Mr. Putin returned to the presidency for a third term in 2012, he has sought to refurbish and modernize the country’s military, which remains reliant on conscripts despite proposed reforms over the years, by increasing spending for weapons and benefits. Russia conducted a similar exercise last year in the Eastern Military District, which extends across Siberia to the Pacific Coast; it was described as the largest single military drill since the collapse of the Soviet Union more than two decades ago. The military also held smaller exercises in southern Russia ahead of the Olympic Games in Sochi.
General Shoigu, in his remarks, made clear that Russia’s military ambitions extended beyond its borders. He said that Russia intended to expand its military operations and presence globally by holding negotiations with Nicaragua, Venezuela, Singapore and the Seychelles to provide logistical support for strategic air patrols.
“We need refueling bases either in the area of the Equator or elsewhere,” he said, according to Interfax.