Ukraine leader calls Russia’s moves a ‘declaration of war’
Interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk urges Putin to pull back his troops as the new government in Kiev announces it is calling up military reservists and putting national police units on “high alert.”- Challenges mount for leaders in Kiev
- Anger spills into east Ukraine streets
- Post's View: Spell out consequences
Ukraine's leader urges Putin to pull back military
Video:
Ukraine's army is put on full combat alert, while the United States
calls for the immediate deployment of international monitors to the
former Soviet republic.
Western officials, including Secretary of State John F. Kerry, were unequivocal in their denunciations of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. Kerry called it “an incredible act of aggression.”
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Obama to Putin: Pull back Russian forces in Crimea
The president spoke to his Russian counterpart by phone as international tensions over Ukraine escalate.
In Kiev, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told a news conference that “we are on the brink of disaster.”
Ukrainian leaders worried that Russia was looking for any provocative move on their part to justify an attack. By late Sunday, there had still been no reports of any fighting.
But Russian soldiers spread out across the Crimean Peninsula, taking control of military and civilian installations. In some cases Ukrainian military units, surrounded in their bases, refused to surrender their weapons.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was silent Sunday. A pro-intervention in rally was held in Moscow. An anti-war rally was broken up by police.
“If President Putin wants to be the president who started a war between two neighboring and friendly countries, Ukraine and Russia, so he has reached that target within a few inches,” said Yatsenyuk, speaking in English.
He said there was no reason justifying the Russian invasion.
“We believe that our western partners and the entire global community will support the territorial integrity and unity of Ukraine.”
An anti-Putin rally was held in Kharkiv, in the Russian-speaking eastern part of Ukraine.
Russian television reported that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were fleeing to Russia, but reports from border crossings suggested that this was not at all the case. The main Russian television station said it would cancel its broadcast of the Oscar ceremony because of the tensions over Ukraine.
In Kiev, the acting president, Oleksandr Turchinov, replaced most of the country’s governors, who had been loyalists to ousted president Viktor Yanukovych.
Large convoys of Russian troops were seen moving on the highways between Sevastopol, where Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is located, and Simferopol, the regional capital.
Russian soldiers are digging trenches at the narrow land crossing between Crimea and the rest of Ukraine, according to a report from the BBC.
Hundreds of Russian troops appeared Sunday morning at the Ukrainian army base at Perevalne in Crimea, as Ukrainians soldiers stood at the gates in a tense standoff.
In Kiev, the head of State Security Council, Andriy Parubiy, said all Ukrainian reservists should report immediately to their mobilization stations.
No shots have been fired in Crimea.
Russian media said that Ukrainian troops were not resisting. Ukraine’s new interior minister, Arsen Avakov, on Sunday denied reports of mass resignations from the Ukraine army in Crimea, saying not a single officer has abandoned his post.
Words of protest
The continuing Maidan protest camp on Kiev’s Independence Square swelled Sunday as tens of thousands of people turned out to demonstrate against the Russian action. That camp was established last November when President Viktor Yanukovych abruptly dropped a pending trade deal with the European Union and turned to Russia instead. Putin has consistently been a focus of the protesters’ ire.
In Moscow, police detained about 260 people who were protesting against the Crimean intervention on Sunday. About 150 of them were put into police vans outside the Defense Ministry, and more than 100 were detained several blocks away at the Manezh, a plaza next to Red Square. The protesters were seemingly taken at random. One man was holding a blank sheet of paper. Another man, who identified himself as a journalist, was picked up as he was talking to two women. Police left the women alone.
Moscow authorities gave permission for a march in favor of the invasion of Crimea and shut off a central boulevard to make way for it later Sunday.
On Saturday night, President Obama, who had warned Putin on Friday against military intervention in Crimea, had an apparently tense 90-minute telephone exchange with the Russian president.
Obama said that a refusal by Russia to send troops back to their bases in Ukraine would “impact Russia’s standing in the international community.” According to the Kremlin, Putin argued that Ukrainian “ultranationalists” were threatening “the lives and health of Russian citizens” in Crimea.
On Sunday, Kerry said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Putin is “ going to lose on the international stage. Russia is going to lose, the Russian people are going to lose, and he’s going to lose all of the glow that came out of the Olympics, his $60 billion extravaganza.”
Kerry also said that the United States and its allies would consider asset freezes, visa bans and trade penalties if Russian troops continued their incursion in Crimea.
In Crimea and in cities across eastern Ukraine, where opposition to Kiev’s new government runs high, Russia’s aggressive stance gladdened the hearts of thousands of protesters. Russian flags were raised in Donetsk, and a group of pro-government activists who had occupied the main government building in Kharkiv were beaten and routed by pro-Russian protesters. More than 100 were reported injured.
But Ukrainian nationalist groups in the country’s west vowed to mobilize against the Russian threat.
Russia and the West find themselves on the brink of a confrontation far more perilous than in 2008 over Georgia, Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center wrote on his blog, referring to Russia’s previous war. The Ukrainian military, which has taken part in NATO operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and partnered frequently with its Polish counterpart, is far smaller than Russia’s. But if a confrontation should erupt, the Russians would find that Ukraine’s forces are better equipped and trained than Georgia’s were.
Still, Russia has worked since 2008 to improve its military capabilities, through reforms and increased spending.
The pressure on Kiev, where a new government was sworn in Thursday after the ouster of Yanukovych from the Ukrainian presidency, is intense. Vitali Klitschko, leader of the UDAR party and a candidate for president, called for a general mobilization to thwart the Russians.
On Saturday, Yatsenyuk — the prime minister — called for “the government and authorities of Russia to recall their forces and to return them to their stations. Russian partners, stop provoking civil and military confrontation in Ukraine.”
Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, said the Russian president had not decided whether to use the authorization to send in more troops.
Putin may choose not to push the Crimean crisis any further, said Mark Galeotti, a New York University professor and Russian security expert in Moscow.
“Anything more than that would be trickier and messier,” Galeotti said. “In classic Putin style, he’s increasing tension. He’s trying to make sure Kiev understands it has to consider Russian interests in whatever post-Yanukovych order emerges. I don’t think Russia wants to annex Crimea. It wants to make sure its bases are protected and its client regions are given the most autonomy they can arrange.”
Orchestrated maneuver
Russia’s decision to authorize troops came in what appeared to be a highly orchestrated series of steps, beginning with a plea to Moscow for fraternal assistance from Crimea’s new leader. And it raises as many questions about what kind of country Russia will become as it does about Ukraine.
Just last Sunday night, Putin was sitting in Sochi’s Fisht Stadium for the Closing Ceremonies of the Winter Olympics. Thomas Bach, the head of the International Olympic Committee, declared: “You send a powerful message from Sochi to the world: the message of a society of peace, tolerance and respect.”
The next night, more than 400 Russians were rounded up in Moscow, protesting prison terms for anti-Putin demonstrators. Later in the week, opposition leader Alexei Navalny was put under house arrest for two months.
And now, troops for Ukraine.
“I am very ashamed today,” tweeted Viktor Shenderovich, a Russian satirist.
But the members of the upper house of Russia’s parliament, who voted unanimously to give Putin a free hand to deploy troops to Ukraine, appeared to be delighted. They also appealed to him to recall the Russian ambassador to Washington, to show displeasure over what they described as threats by Obama over Ukraine.
In Crimea, helmeted soldiers with military-style rifles, without insignia and declining to state their nationality, stood guard at, or encircled, government installations. Troops patrolled the airport in Simferopol, which was closed to air traffic, and stood in front of the council of ministers and regional parliament, where a Russian flag flew from the roof. Soldiers also control the military airport at Belbek.
Earlier in the day, the new prime minister of the Crimea region, Serhiy Aksyonov, appealed to Putin for help maintaining “peace and tranquility.”
In short order, the Russian Foreign Ministry claimed that “unidentified gunmen directed from Kiev” had tried to capture the Crimean Interior Ministry headquarters. Calling the attempt a “treacherous provocation,” Moscow said, “We believe it is irresponsible to continue whipping up the already tense situation in the Crimea.”
Igor Aveytskiy, who was named by the Kiev government to serve as chief of Crimea’s national police, said there was no attack.
“It’s all rumors, all lies,” said Mikhail Amirov, a member of a pro-Russia self-defense militia on guard in front of the headquarters building.
A committee of the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, asked Putin to intervene. He made his request, and the Federation Council, the upper house, promptly gave it unanimous approval. The authorization does not limit the troops to Crimea but allows them to be sent to all of Ukraine.
On Saturday afternoon, 10 troop carriers, accompanied by armored jeeps, arrived at the Ukrainian coast guard base in the resort town of Balaklava and took up positions inside and outside the installation. Russian Orthodox priests stood among the troops and sang hymns.
Large crowds gathered to wave Russian flags wherever the troops appeared.
The Crimea regional government, dominated by pro-Russia deputies, announced it would hold a referendum March 30 to decide among three choices: “to retain its current status as an autonomous republic within Ukraine, to become an independent state, or to become part of Russia,” according to the Russian news agency RIA Novosti.
Violation of agreement?
In Kiev, Klitschko called on the Verkhovna Rada, or Ukrainian parliament, to renounce the agreement permitting the Russian navy to maintain its base in Sevastopol.
Lesya Orobets, a member of the Rada and an organizer of the protest movement, wrote on Facebook that “people who were no longer afraid of their mad dictator” and were able to overthrow him — a reference to the ousted Yanukovych — “should not be afraid of another dictator.”
Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who helped negotiate a 1994 memorandum on Ukrainian territorial sovereignty, tweeted Saturday that there is “no doubt in my mind that Russia is violating its commitments.”
In Kharkiv, police stood by as protesters swarmed into a building occupied by activists who support the new government, beating their opponents before hoisting Russian and Ukrainian flags. Tens of thousands of people gathered in the morning to protest the Maidan revolution.
The assault on the building was “completely spontaneous,” said Denis Levshinko, a sociology student who participated in the rout of the Maidan activists. “We are all fed up with them. We united, and we chased them out.”
Many of the occupiers were taken captive and dragged onto the street, where, forced to their knees, they apologized to the jubilant crowds.
“They’re drug addicts,” one woman said. “They’re no better than frozen vegetables.”
Englund reported from Kiev; Lally reported from Moscow.
Ukraine leader calls Russia’s moves a ‘declaration of war’
Interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk urges Putin to pull back his troops as the new government in Kiev announces it is calling up military reservists and putting national police units on “high alert.”Kerry: ‘Russia is going to lose’ if intervention advances
The escalating situation could warrant asset freezes, visa bans and trade penalties from the U.S. and its allies, the secretary of state says.
A test for Obama’s focus on diplomacy
Russia’s Vladimir Putin quickly — and
comprehensively — dismisses the president, who now faces a defiant
Moscow and few ways to enforce his threat over a military foray into
Crimea.
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