Putin Urges Autonomy Talks in Ukraine
In an interview Sunday, President Vladimir V.
Putin of Russia veered between veiled threats and demands that the
Ukraine government negotiate directly with separatists.
MOSCOW
— President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Sunday called on Ukraine to
begin talks on “the statehood” of that country’s rebellious southeast, a
vague and provocative turn of phrase used by Mr. Putin as he demanded
that the Ukrainian government negotiate directly with pro-Russian
separatists.
Western
governments have accused Russia of backing the separatists with arms
and fighters and of sending Russian troops to lead a counteroffensive in
Ukraine over the past week that threatened Mariupol, an important port
city, and left thousands of government troops encircled.
“We
must immediately begin substantive, meaningful negotiations, not on
technical questions, but about the political organization of society and
the statehood of Ukraine’s southeast for the unconditional securing of
the legal interests of the people who live there,” Mr. Putin said.
Dmitri
S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, said that Mr. Putin was not calling
for independence for eastern Ukraine. Rather, he said, the Russian
leader was seeking inclusive negotiations that would provide greater
autonomy for the country’s southeast as it remained a part of the
country.
The
self-proclaimed independent republics in Luhansk and Donetsk, which
held haphazard, self-organized referendums on independence in May, have
repeatedly requested Russian recognition, protection and annexation.
Although the Kremlin annexed Crimea in March, it has for months avoided
formally recognizing the separatist states.
Mr. Putin spoke Sunday on a televised news program in Moscow as European leaders vowed at a summit meeting
in Brussels to toughen economic sanctions against Russia by the end of
the week if the conflict in Ukraine continued to escalate.
In
the interview, Mr. Putin veered between veiled threats and demands for
negotiations to resolve the conflict in Ukraine. He said that country
should cease hostilities immediately and renew its supplies of natural
gas, which are piped in from Russia, to survive the coming winter.
“I
think that nobody thinks of that anymore, except Russia,” Mr. Putin
said of the winter. “There are ways of helping resolve the issue. First,
to immediately stop hostilities and start restoring the necessary
infrastructure. To start replenishing reserves, conducting the necessary
repair operations and preparing for the cold season.”
Mr.
Putin, however, gave rare praise to President Petro O. Poroshenko of
Ukraine after a meeting with him in Minsk, Belarus, calling Mr.
Poroshenko “a partner with whom dialogue can be conducted.”
Earlier, Mr. Putin toughened his rhetoric on Ukraine,
making a direct address on the Kremlin’s website to “the militias of
Novorossiya,” or New Russia, a controversial phrase for the region,
including the rebel strongholds of Donetsk and Luhansk, which was once
controlled by the Russian empire. In the address, he invoked the phrase
to hail the success of the rebel offensive.
He
called for the militias to allow for the opening of corridors for
Ukrainian troops to retreat, a plea that was promptly granted by the
prime minister of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic, Aleksandr
Zakharchenko. Mr. Zakharchenko said, however, that the Ukrainian forces
must surrender their artillery and heavy vehicles.
On Sunday, meanwhile, Russia announced that Ukraine had returned 10 army paratroopers who were arrested last week inside Ukraine after coming under artillery fire.
Ukraine’s
Security Services said the men had been detained about 20 miles from
the border and were evidence of the presence of Russian troops fighting
in Ukraine. Russia claimed that the men had strayed into Ukrainian
territory by accident during a routine border patrol.
“The
negotiations were very difficult,” said Aleksei Ragozin, the deputy
commander of Russia’s Airborne Forces, according to the RIA Novosti
state news agency. “However, common sense triumphed, and all ended well.
The most important thing is that our guys are back with us, in Russia.”
“I want to emphasize that we never abandon our own,” he added.
Ukraine Crisis in Maps
The latest updates to the current visual survey of the
continuing dispute, with maps and satellite imagery showing rebel and
military movement.
Pro-Russian
separatists also said that they had released several hundred captured
Ukrainian regular and irregular soldiers on Sunday who were captured
during last week’s offensive.
In
Mariupol, the industrial port city now within the sights of the
pro-Russian militants, an obstacle to any recognition of the separatist
government was on full display on Sunday: large parts of the Donetsk
region were still inhabited by overt supporters of the central
government, and now beyond control of their organization.
Unlike
the unrecognized pro-Russian enclaves of South Ossetia, Abkhazia and
Transnistria that were formed in the 1990s with the backing of Russian
peacekeeping forces, the borders of the self-declared republics of
Donetsk and Luhansk are now amorphous, and most of the territory, in
spite of the recent counteroffensive, is under government control.
On
the eastern edge of Mariupol, a city of about half a million
inhabitants on a bluff overlooking sunflower fields, workers from the
city’s Soviet-legacy steel plants and a few hundred volunteers were
digging trenches and bunkers and filling sandbags to defend against the
expected attack.
Men
in hard hats and the gray and red overalls of the Azov Steel Works
filled sandbags, stopping to wipe their brows in the midday sun. Asked
why he was laying the steel slabs on the fortification, one man replied
that he wanted to show Mr. Putin that he would not be welcome in
Mariupol.
The
workers arrived with flatbed trucks carrying steel slabs, yellow
backhoes and mobile cranes to hoist over the tops of bunkers gigantic
22-foot-long and 7-foot-wide slabs of raw steel fresh from the blast
furnaces. Each was nine inches thick and weighed 25 tons. “Everybody is
trying to help in their own way,” said Vasili Sisentsov, a steelworker.
Mariupol,
considered a solidly pro-Ukrainian city, never fell under full control
of pro-Russian groups. As elsewhere in eastern Ukraine, the separatist
movement failed to attract the urban middle class, but in Mariupol it
also lost the backbone of the community and local economy, the steel
workers, who feared that their plants would close and jobs would be lost
in an isolated, unrecognized republic unable to export steel.
“The
Donetsk People’s Republic didn’t work out in our town,” Mr. Sisentsov
said. “They were all drug addicts, homeless people and criminals. It was
clear it would never succeed.” Last spring, steel workers, with the
support of the factory management, formed volunteer foot patrols in the
city to drive out the pro-Russian agitators.
Now,
the mood is more uncertain, he said. Families with children have left,
he said, and the steel slabs the workers were unloading were more
symbolic than militarily useful, as the fields beyond were wide open for
tanks to cross. The soldiers who seized the border town of Novoazovsk,
27 miles away, who claim to be from the Army of Novorossiya, say they
also intend to capture Mariupol, but have not said when.
At
one point, a man drove by a hive of activity of volunteers and steel
workers digging in at the checkpoint, yelling out of the window of his
car: “It’s worthless! Russia is coming!”
Andrei
Markov, a grocery store manager, showed up with his son, Artur, 13,
carrying work gloves and asking the soldiers where to dig. “I came to
help my country, to help my city,” he said. Other residents arrived and
asked the soldiers: “Guys, what do you need? We’ll buy it for you.”
A
few soldiers stood about, nervously watching the road to the east.
Denis, a private who declined to give his last name, said he had been
assigned to crowd-control duties on Maidan Square in Kiev, Ukraine’s
capital, last winter, where protesters hurled insults, cobblestones and
homemade bombs at him for weeks. He said he disagreed with the
protester’s methods, and felt vilified for having served in the police
during that period, but would nonetheless stand his post at the edge of
Mariupol now.
“No
matter what this country’s problems, and no matter how it treats me,
it’s my country and I am a soldier,” he said. “I will defend it.”
COPY http://international.nytimes.com/
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