UKRAINE SEEKS MEETING WITH RUSSIA
It wants an explanation about movement of Russian troops along border
UKRAINE has requested an urgent meeting with Russia and dozens of other European states to explain Moscow’s build-up of forces along the ex-Soviet state’s frontier.
Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on Facebook on Sunday that Russia had ignored Kyiv’s formal request for an explanation about why Moscow had positioned more than 100,000 troops and advanced weapons around Ukraine.
“Ukraine is convening a meeting with Russia and all member states in the next 48 hours to discuss the reinforcement and movement of Russian forces along our border.”
The 1990 Vienna Document requires the 57 members of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe to share information about their military forces and notify each other about major activities.
The United States fears that Russia’s build-up of forces could lead to an invasion of Ukraine “any day”.
World powers yesterday warned Moscow that they stand ready to impose sanctions that would have a huge and immediate
impact on Russia’s economy, should it pursue any further military aggression against Ukraine.
“Our priority is to support efforts to de-escalate the situation,” finance ministers of the G7 group of most developed nations said.
However, if Moscow ramped up military action, the G7 warned that they “are prepared to collectively impose economic and financial sanctions which will have massive and immediate consequences on the Russian economy”.
More airlines are likely to avoid Ukraine’s airspace amid insurance issues and a decision by leading European carriers to stop overflights after a US warning that Russia could invade at any time, a flight operations advisory firm said yesterday.
Dutch airline KLM said it would halt flights to Ukraine and
through the country’s airspace, while Germany’s Lufthansa said it was considering a suspension.
British Airways (BA) flights between London and Asia yesterday appeared to be avoiding the airspace, according to Reuters monitoring of flight tracking service FlightRadar24.
“My guess would be that Ukraine will become unavailable pretty soon if what we’ve seen over the weekend crystallises into a couple of more carriers actually pulling the pin,” said Mark Zee, founder of flight operations advisory firm OPSGROUP.
“I don’t think it will be government advice that’s doing it so much as it will be insurancebased unavailability or carriers looking at other carriers. So if you have KLM, Lufthansa and BA, for example, deciding not to overfly Ukraine at all, we’re almost back into an MH17 scenario.”