G7 urges tough line on Putin
Obama, Merkel agree to further sanctions if Russia reneges on Ukraine
• Prime Minister Stephen Harper may already have had what he wanted most from the G7 summit only hours after the two-day meeting began Sunday in the Bavarian Alps.
The West’s two most powerful leaders, U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, agreed Sunday to continue supporting the isolation of Russian President Vladimir Putin through economic sanctions on his country unless he honours a peace deal he helped broker in Ukraine and agrees to respect that country’s territorial integrity.
“The duration of sanctions should be clearly linked to Russia’s full implementation of the Minsk agreements and respect for Ukraine’s sovereignty,” the White House said in a statement after Obama and Merkel had a tete-atete, which included a typical Bavarian meal of weisswurst, steins of beer and an abundance of gemutlichkeit.
Worried that Europe’s resolve might crumble with the end of current EU sanctions this summer, Harper has pushed many times over the past year for maintaining a strong, unified stance against what Obama has called Russia’s “aggression” in Ukraine. The prime minister did so again during a visit Saturday to Kyiv, where his government announced additional nonlethal assistance for Ukraine’s badly overmatched security forces, which recently have faced a dramatic increase in artillery attacks in the eastern part of the country by Putin’s proxies.
While there has been speculation that Harper might also push the G7 to arm Ukrainians, a source familiar with his goals at the gathering said his priority, like Obama’s, has been to ensure that no breach develops in the trans-Atlantic alliance to maintain pressure on the Putin regime. Although, other than words to the effect that the summit was “going well so far” — overhead by a pool reporter — Harper has said nothing in public in Bavaria.
The positions of Harper, Obama and Merkel on Ukraine were echoed by the European Union’s new president, Donald Tusk of Poland. “If anyone wants to start a debate about changing the sanctions regime, the discussion could only be about strengthening it,” he said.
At the same time, Britain has been floating the idea that the G7 should assist those Western countries whose businesses and workers have been hurt by the economic sanctions imposed on Russia.
Merkel originally had hoped the summit she was hosting would centre largely on climate change and ways to help Africa economically and with fighting diseases such as Ebola. But that goal, as well as discussing global economic and trade matters, were shunted aside not only by the need to deal with Putin’s ongoing provocations but by other pressing security matters — namely, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and how the West might respond more adroitly than it has so far to the brutality of Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and its growing influence elsewhere in the Muslim world.
Putin, of course, was not present at what was formerly known as the G8 summit. He was kicked out of the group last year after Russian troops invaded and annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. Since then Russia has put former Soviet republics, Scandinavia and much of the rest of Europe on edge by conducting a series of major military exercises, and by sending fighter jets and bombers to test the margins of NATO air space. Putin has even hinted
By the grace of God, I have nothing to regret
that Russia might use nuclear weapons.
On the eve of the G7 meeting, Putin’s only comments were blaming the West for any problems in Ukraine, saying the people of Crimea and eastern Ukraine had a right to be independent. But his words were not as hawkish as they often have been.
“Only an insane person and only in a dream can anyone imagine that Russia would suddenly attack NATO,” he told Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper.
Not that he was backing down, either. “By the grace of God, I have nothing to regret in my life,” he said.