‘There will be costs’: Obama
Officials in Kyiv alarmed over sightings of Russian helicopters flying over Crimea
BELBEK,
UKRAINE — U. S . President Barack Obama has warned Russia that “there will be costs” if it sends combat forces into Ukraine.
The U.S. was deeply concerned by “reports of military movements taken by the Russian Federation inside Ukraine,” the president said in a statement Friday.
Earlier Friday, Ukraine’s interior minister accused Russia of launching a “military invasion” of Crimea.
It was well short of that, but it was impossible to divine exactly what was taking place on the ground militarily on this Ukrainian peninsula that juts into the Black Sea.
What alarmed officials in Kyiv on Friday were a pair of video clips taken at different locations that purported to show 11 Russian helicopters flying low over what was said to be Crimea. Among them were Mi-24 Hinds and more modern Mi-28 Havocs with transport helicopters at the front and back of the formation.
Russia acknowledged the movement of armoured vehicles in a statement released by the Russian foreign minister in Moscow, but said they were designed only to protect Russian naval bases in Crimea.
“What is happening is in full accordance with the basic Russian-Ukrainian agreements on the Black Sea fleet,” said the statement, which was released after a Ukrainian diplomat demanded an explanation from Russian officials. Those agreements permit Russian military troops and equipment to move around in Crimea but are subject to certain limitations.
An unnamed senior White House official told The Washington Post late Friday that some Russian troops had arrived in Crimea. But he did not provide numbers or say where they had been deployed.
Whether this is another act in a game of brinkmanship or the beginning of a major military intervention in Ukraine was not yet obvious.
The ethnic Russian majority in Crimea always has had a strong secessionist element, but such sentiment has grown since a bloody revolt in Kyiv toppled president Viktor Yanukovych last week. Whatever was up with the helicopters, this was only one of several military dramas underway at the same time in Crimea.
A military officer in combat green with a Russian flag patch on his shoulder and two stocky bodyguards in plain clothes beside him were stopped at gunpoint after crossing through a barricade blocking access to a former Soviet airbase. The officer was allowed to continue into the base alone after one of the men in combat fatigues who had stopped him spoke on a cellphone that the officer handed him.
An hour later, the officer’s bodyguards and his driver drove their silver Soviet-era Volga car with black Russian military licence plates through the roadblock and on to the airfield, which is about 30 kilometres north of the naval base that is home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet.
“No subdivision of the Black Sea fleet has been advanced into the Belbek area, let alone involved in blocking it,” a spokesman for the fleet told Russia’s RIA/Novosti news agency.
“Given the unstable situation around the Black Sea fleet bases in Crimea, and the places where our service members live with their families, security has been stepped up by the Black Sea fleet’s anti-terror units,” the official, speaking anonymously, said.
Cars streaming Russian flags out their windows honked their support to the men in battle dress and the self-declared Crimean Russian patriots at Belbek, who kept the curious back from the outer barricades.
Drab green troop transports with their licence plates removed chugged by the airport every few minutes on an adjacent highway, waving enthusiastically at those manning the barricades.
A column of military transports with Russian flags on their doors idled beside a nearby road. Elsewhere, about a dozen armoured personnel carriers were spotted on the move.
The latest military intrigues began with the seizure in the wee hours of Friday of the airbase at Belbek and of Crimea’s busier commercial airport in Simferopol by similarly dressed men carrying assault rifles. Unrest won’t affect markets:
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