Putin blames Ukraine
Russian military boosts defences in Crimea
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday blamed the latest standoff with neighbouring Ukraine on the presidential ambitions of Ukraine’s leader, as the Russian military announced it was boosting its defences in Crimea.
Ukraine, for its part, released what it said was the exact location where its ships were fired on Sunday by Russia, showing that they were in international waters approaching Kerch Strait from the west, not from the east, as Putin suggested.
Russia and Ukraine are still reeling from their first overt military confrontation since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, a clash Sunday in the Kerch Strait near Russia-occupied Crimea. Russian border guards fired on three Ukrainian ships, seizing them and their 24 crewmembers. Ukraine insists its vessels were operating in line with international maritime rules, while Russia says they had failed to get permission to pass through a Russiacontrolled area.
The strait links the Black Sea with the Sea of Azov and is where Russia has built a long new bridge — the only land link between Crimea and the Russian mainland.
The incident has drawn strong criticism of Russia by the United States and its allies and has fueled fears of wider fighting in the region. It’s part of the long-simmering conflict between the two countries, in which Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and supported separatists in Ukraine’s east with clandestine dispatches of troops and weapons. That fighting has killed at least 10,000 people since 2014 but eased somewhat with a 2015 truce.
Putin on Wednesday broke his silence on the maritime clash, blaming it on Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s desire to get re-elected.
“That was a provocation which was certainly organized by the sitting officials, including the president,” ahead of Ukraine’s presidential election in March, Putin said.
Poroshenko’s original proposal — to impose martial law in Ukraine for two months after the clash with Russia — would have meant the March president vote would have to be scrapped due to election rules. He later halved the martial law time frame to a month, which would allow the election to go ahead as planned. The Kremlin has warned that Ukraine’s declaration of martial law in areas that border Russia could re-ignite the fighting.