Ukraine leader to visit White House for pep talk

Obama aide blasts GOP’s criticism of U.S. foreign policy

Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk will visit President Obama at the White House on Wednesday, an administration spokesman said Sunday, as the administration continues to develop its response to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.

“The visit will highlight the strong support of the United States for the people of Ukraine, who have demonstrated inspiring courage and resilience through recent times of crisis,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said.

The meeting between Obama and Yatsenyuk comes less than a week before a referendum in the Crimea region on whether to leave Ukraine and join Russia. Both have called the Crimea secession referendum illegal and inappropriate, given Russia’s military incursion into the region.

“This is our land,” Yatsenyuk told a crowd in Kiev on Sunday. “Our fathers and grandfathers have spilled their blood for this land. And we won’t budge a single centimeter from Ukrainian land. Let Russia and its president know this.”

Also on Sunday, a top White House official dismissed criticism that Obama’s past foreign policy record influenced Russia’s military action in Crimea.

Tony Blinken, a White House deputy national security adviser, said that the Republican argument that Obama has shown

weakness on foreign policy —particularly in how he’s dealt with the 3-year-old Syrian war — and thus emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin to deploy troops into the semi-autonomous Crimean region of Russia was hollow.

“The notion that this is somehow a result of Syria makes very little sense to me,” Blinken said on CNN’s State of the Union. “This is about Ukraine.”

Last year, after previously calling the use of chemical weapons by Syria’s Bashar Assad regime a “red line” that must not be crossed, Obama declined to take military action against the regime after it was determined Assad had deployed chemical weapons against the opposition.

The stout defense by a top foreign policy official at the White House comes after Republicans have pilloried Obama in recent days over the crisis.

On Sunday, former vice president Dick Cheney argued that Obama could give a more robust response, including conducting a joint military exercise with Poland and possibly revisiting a U.S. plan to build a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

The project, intended to protect Europe from missile threats from Iran, is opposed by Moscow and was put on the back burner by Obama after he took office and tried to reset U.S-Russian relations.