Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Russia, Ukraine spar on sea clash
Putin lays blame for standoff on neighbor’s political posturing
KIEV, Ukraine — Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday blamed the latest standoff with neighboring Ukraine on the presidential ambitions of Ukraine’s leader, as the Russian military announced it was boosting its defenses 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 Russia-controlled area.
The strait links the Black Sea with the Sea of Azov and is where Russia has built a long 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 presidential vote would have to be scrapped because of 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 in eastern Ukraine.
Putin also claimed the Ukrainian vessels refused to communicate with Russian border guards and were in violation of the Russian territorial waters off the country’s south, which, unlike the Crimean coast, is Russia’s internationally recognized border. This runs counter to the claims of the Ukrainian government, which said the ships were approaching from another direction and were firmly in international waters.
Kurt Volker, the U.S. special envoy to Ukraine, told reporters in Berlin that Washington sees no reason to doubt the information from Kiev that its vessels were operating in line with international maritime rules.
Putin insisted that the Russian border guards were acting in line with the usual protocol when they decided to fire on the Ukrainian ships.
“What were they supposed to do?” he said of the Russian border guards in televised remarks Wednesday. “If they had done something differently, they should have been put on trial for that.”
U.S. authorities, however, believe that there was “no conceivable justification … for the use of force in this scenario.”
In a phone call Wednesday, President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed their concern about the incident, said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. She said the two will further discuss it later this week during the Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Trump said he would be receiving a “full report” from his national security team on Russia’s recent actions in eastern Ukraine and the Black Sea. He said he would decide on a course afterward.
In an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday, Trump said he might cancel the sit-down with Putin in Argentina over Russia’s seizure of the Urkainian ships.
“Maybe I won’t have the meeting,” he said. “Maybe I won’t even have the meeting.”
Trump added: “I don’t like that aggression. I don’t want that aggression at all.”
But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Wednesday that the meeting is on and that Russia has not received “any other information from our U.S. counterparts.”
Putin’s foreign affairs adviser, Yuri Ushakov, noted that the meeting, which is set for Saturday, has been prepared through official channels and Moscow expects Washington to notify it of any changes in the same way.
“This meeting is necessary for both sides,” Ushakov said. “It’s important in view of the developing situation in the world.”