Ukraine dismisses Russian threats to intervene, continues ‘anti-terrorist’ campaign
Pentagon says Russia has violated Ukraine’s airspace multiple times in last 24 hours
(about 7 hours later)
DONETSK, Ukraine — The Ukrainian government Friday brushed off Russian threats of intervention in a tense standoff in eastern Ukraine, declaring that Ukraine’s “anti-terrorist operation” against pro-Russian militiamen occupying government buildings would continue.
The Pentagon said late Friday that Russian aircraft had entered Ukrainian airspace “on several occasions in the last 24 hours” and called on Moscow to take “immediate steps” to de-escalate rising tensions.
Ukrainian troops clashed with pro-Russian militants at barricades and checkpoints Thursday in eastern Ukraine, with fighting centered around the breakaway city of Slovyansk, a separatist stronghold.
The air incursions, which officials said may have been part of an effort to test Ukraine’s radar, took place as tens of thousands of Russian troops, massed on Ukraine’s southern and eastern borders for weeks, began “military drills” announced Thursday.
“We do not want any casualties. We will not storm the city. We realize that there may be a large number of injured people in this case,” said Vasyl Krutov, deputy chief of Ukraine’s Security Service, at a news briefing in Kiev on Friday.
As skirmishing continued in eastern Ukraine between government forces and pro-Russia militants, the halting U.S.-European effort to impose additional sanctions on Russia picked up speed amid a flurry of calls among top government leaders and agreement that last week’s deal with Moscow to calm the situation was all but dead.
President Obama said during an Asian trip that “additional targeted sanctions” against Russia are “ready to go” following consultations with European allies. Obama spoke Friday morning with the leaders of France, Germany, Italy and Britain, who agreed that Russia has not complied with promises it made in a de-escalation agreement last week in Geneva and has “in fact continued to escalate the situation,” the White House said.
European Union foreign ministers planned to meet Monday in Brussels to approve new asset freezes and visa bans on at least 15 prominent Russians close to President Vladimir Putin and deemed responsible for the deteriorating situation in Ukraine, a European official said.
A spokesman for British Prime Minister David Cameron said that the allies had “agreed that in the light of Russia’s refusal to support the [de-escalation] process, an extension of the current targeted sanctions would need to be implemented.”
The United States, which has its own target list, held off announcing new sanctions as President Obama called the leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Italy to confirm they were on the same page.
In Kiev, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said Friday that Ukraine’s military move -- called ATO, for Anti-Terrorist Operation — would continue.
“We will have to act,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, “and I think this will be a common European action and a joint action of the G7 states.” The Group of 7 leading world economies also includes Canada and Japan.
“There’s been no suspension of the ATO in the face of threats from an invasion by Russian armed forces,” Avakov said.
In Moscow, officials steeled themselves against possible further sanctions, saying that their economy could handle anything the West threw at it. They continued to warn that they reserved the right to send troops into Ukrainian territory as a matter of “self-defense” if they felt Russian interests were being threatened, comparing the situation to Georgia in 2008, when Russia invaded to defend pro-Russia separatists in a breakaway province.
The Ukrainian interior minister said, “The terrorists should be on their guard around the clock. Civilians have nothing to fear.”
“There are relevant provisions of the U.N. Charter,” said Russia’s envoy to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, in an interview Friday on a Russian news program.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel called Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday to discuss the tense situation in Ukraine, Merkel’s spokesman and the Kremlin said.
Even before new sanctions hit, Russian markets were in turmoil after the Standard & Poor’s rating agency cut the nation’s credit rating to one notch above junk, citing the political situation. The Russian Central Bank hiked its benchmark interest rate by half a percentage point to 7.5 percent to combat rising inflation, and the ruble, which has plummeted 8.9 percent against the dollar this year, sank further.
The Russian leader appeared to give no ground in his insistence that the interim government in Kiev back down against pro-Russian separatists who have seized several cities in eastern Ukraine.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a forum of young diplomats on Friday that the Ukrainian government needed to halt its attempts to dislodge the separatists who have taken over several cities in the country’s east, saying only then would those militants lay down their arms.
“Putin harshly condemned the attempts of the regime in Kiev to use armed forces against peaceful civilians in the southeast of the country,” the Kremlin said in a statement.
President Obama, who has commented on Ukraine at virtually every stop during a week-long tour of Asia, said that “additional targeted sanctions” against Russia are “ready to go.”
But there were few signs of open conflict Friday in or around the contested eastern cities.
At a news conference in Seoul with South Korean President Park Geun-hye, Obama said the new measures would be imposed “assuming we don’t see any drastic changes in behavior on the part of the Russians.” In addition to more “targeted” sanctions, he said the groundwork was being laid “so that if and when we see even greater escalation, perhaps even military incursion by Russia into Ukraine, that we’re prepared for the sort of sectoral sanctions that would have even larger consequences.”
In Mariupol, a southeastern Ukrainian port city on the Sea of Azov, control of the local government was back in the hands of the separatist People’s Republic of Donetsk on Friday, a day after Kiev proclaimed the City Hall there liberated from pro-Russian militiamen. At some point after that declaration, the local mayor and police agreed to cede the city’s administrative headquarters once again to the separatists, who were busy Friday making molotov cocktails in the basement of City Hall.
Europe has thus far resisted sanctions on doing business with wholesale sectors of the Russian economy, which are likely to have a far more negative effect on their own economies than on that of the United States. But the European official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the matter, said that European leaders had now agreed to begin planning for sectoral sanctions.
It was not immediately clear why the local government caved, but the development appeared to illustrate the challenges that Kiev faces in trying to regain control in eastern Ukraine.
Birnbaum reported from Moscow.
In Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov charged Friday that the West wants to take control of Ukraine and is obsessed by its geopolitical ambitions.
“Without batting an eye, our Western partners keep demanding day after day that Russia stop interfering in Ukrainian affairs, pull out troops and remove certain agents who have reportedly been caught in the southeast and who are reportedly guiding these processes,” Lavrov said at a forum of young Russian diplomats.
On Thursday night, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said that Russia “has refused to take a single step in the right direction.”
“I have told John Kerry many times — he raised the question about two weeks ago — that they should show Russian agents, if they have really been caught by the Ukrainian services, to people; they should show them on TV,” Lavrov said.
At a news conference in Seoul with South Korean President Park Geung-hye, Obama said new sanctions would be imposed “assuming we don’t see any drastic changes in behavior on the part of the Russians.” In addition to more “targeted” sanctions, Obama said the groundwork was being laid “so that if and when we see even greater escalation, perhaps even military incursion by Russia into Ukraine, that we’re prepared for the sort of sectoral sanctions that would have even larger consequences.”
Cautioning that “the targeted sanctions we’re applying now” would not necessarily solve the immediate problem in Ukraine, Obama said he is trying to “continually raise the costs for Russia of their actions while still leaving the possibility of them moving in a different direction. And we’ll continue to keep some arrows in our quiver in the event that we see a further deterioration of the situation over the next several days or weeks.”
Asset freezes and visa bans have already had an economic effect on Russia, Obama said, and further sanctions would pose problems for the country’s long-term economic interests.
“President Putin is not a stupid man,” he said, and “there’s going to come a point at which he’s got to make a fundamental decision” on whether he is ready to see his faltering economy further weaken because he’s “unwilling to deal with Ukraine in a diplomatic fashion.”
Obama defended his overall policy of trying to reset relations with Russia, noting that the strategy during his first term resulted in cooperation with Moscow on Afghanistan, Iran and other areas. But Putin, “in my second term, has had an increasing tendency to view the world through a Cold War prism and to see Russia’s interests as invariably in conflict with the West’s.”
Still, said Obama, “I absolutely would save Mr. Putin if he were drowning. I’d like to think that if anybody is out there drowning, I’m going to save them.” He recalled that he had grown up in Hawaii and “I used to be a pretty good swimmer.” The reference was to Putin’s comment last week that Obama, despite their differences, was “a decent and quite courageous person,” who would save him if he were drowning.
Obama spoke a day after Russia began military drills on its border with Ukraine in response to Ukrainian military operations that killed “up to five” pro-Russian militants, according to Ukrainian officials.
Putin condemned the Ukrainian actions Thursday, and his top deputies said a Ukrainian mobilization in the restive eastern part of the country would elicit a Russian response. The tit-for-tat military movements brought the two sides closer to a direct armed confrontation in a standoff that analysts call one of the most dangerous on European soil since the end of the Cold War.
“If the Kiev regime has started to use the army against the population inside the country, it beyond any doubt is a very serious crime,” Putin said at a media forum in St. Petersburg. He added that if Ukrainian authorities escalated the confrontation, there would be “consequences.”
Birnbaum reported from Moscow. Griff Witte in Mariupol, Alex Ryabchyn in Donetsk, Will Englund in Moscow, Juliet Eilperin in Tokyo and Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.
