Russia warns Ukraine over ‘lawlessness’ in the east

UKRAINE’S foreign minister yesterday said his country was practically in a state of war with Russia, as Moscow further ratcheted up pressure on Kiev, claiming that Russian-leaning eastern regions h a ve plunged into lawlessness.

Russian forces have effectively taken control over Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in what has turned into Europe’s greatest geopolitical crisis since the end of the Cold War.

On Sunday the region is to hold a referendum on whether to split off and become part of Russia, which the West says it will not recognise.

‘We have to admit that our life now is almost like ... a war,’ foreign minister Andrii Deshchytsya said before meeting his counterparts from Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

‘We have to cope with an aggression that we do not understand.’

Mr Deshchytsya said Ukraine was counting on help from the West. Prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk is to meet US president Barack Obama in Washington tomorrow.

The Russian Foreign Ministry yesterday said lawlessness ‘now rules in eastern regions of Ukraine as a result of the actions of fighters of the so-called “Right Sector” with the full connivance’ of Ukraine’s new authorities.

Right Sector consists of far-right and nationalist factions whose activists were among the most radical and confrontational of the three-month long demonstrations in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, which eventually ousted President Viktor Yanukovych.

The Kremlin statement also claimed Russian citizens trying to enter Ukraine have been turned back at the border by Ukrainian officials. Pro-Russia sentiment is high in Ukraine’s east and there are fears Russia could seek to incorporate that area as well.

Obama has warned that the referendum in Crimea would violate international law. Russian president Vladimir Putin has told German chancellor Angela Merkel and British prime minister David Cameron he supports the vote.