U.S. and Russia in war of words
Putin: Ukraine leader replaced in illegal coup
KIEV, Ukraine — As thousands of Russian and Ukrainian troops stare each other down in Ukraine’s strategic Crimean Peninsula, the worlds-apart views from Moscow and Washington over the dangerous face-off suggested Tuesday that a resolution is far from imminent.
At the same time, signs emerged from the Kremlin and Kiev that both sides are wary of escalating the crisis, in which one nervous reaction could spark a shooting war.
Secretary of State John Kerry, during a visit Tuesday to the Ukrainian capital, accused Russia of gun-barrel diplomacy and brutish behavior more befitting the war-racked 19th century. Moscow, he said, has chosen aggression rather than one of the “countless outlets that an organized, structured, decent world has struggled to put together to resolve these differences so we don’t see a nation unilaterally invade another nation.
“It is not appropriate to invade a country and at the end of a barrel of a gun dictate what you are trying to achieve,” Kerry said as he concluded a visit in Kiev to shrines of the protest movement that recently resulted in Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, fleeing to Russia.
President Barack Obama, meanwhile, chided Presi- dent Vladimir Putin in comments during a Washington school visit, saying the Russian leader wasn’t “fooling anybody” with his claim that he was protecting the Russian minority in Ukraine with an act of naked aggression against a sovereign country.
In Moscow, Putin assembled journalists from Kremlin-controlled media to air his views that Western support for Ukraine’s political opposition had egged on the three-month protest that prompted Yanukovych to leave.
“We have told them a thousand times, ‘Why are you splitting the country?’” Putin said of the U.S. and the European Union.
Putin also denied that the Russian armed forces are engaged in seizing Crimea, saying the uniformed troops without national insignia are “local self-defense forces.”
“As for bringing in forces, for now there is no such need, but such a possibility exists,” he said. “What could serve as a reason to use military force? It would naturally be the last resort. Absolutely the last.”
Putin said he still regarded Yanukovych, widely seen as corrupt and autocratic, as the legitimately elected leader of Ukraine and denounced the interim leadership that has taken power as the executors of “an anti-constitutional coup.”
However, glimmers of hope were seen in Putin’s first direct comments on the Crimean confrontation since Russian gunmen in unmarked military fatigues, armed with high-powered weapons, stormed the regional parliament and government buildings in Simferopol late last week. Since then they have erected cordons around Russian military bases, blockaded Ukrainian installations and taken over the commercial port in Kerch.
Putin said Russia reserved the right to use all options to protect compatriots who were living in “terror” in Ukraine but that force wasn’t needed for now.
On Sunday, the Russian leader agreed during a phone call with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to a proposed fact-finding mission by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which includes all EU states as well as the U.S., Ukraine and Russia. An observer delegation could begin deploying to Crimea as early as Wednesday.
And in one of the most encouraging, if tentative, signs, Ukraine’s interim prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, said Tuesday at a news conference that officials in Kiev and Moscow were talking behind the scenes, a development that might give cooler heads an opportunity to prevail outside the world spotlight.
“We hope that Russia will understand its responsibility in destabilizing the security situation in Europe, that Russia will realize that Ukraine is an independent state and that Russian troops will leave the territory of Ukraine,” Yatsenyuk said.
Earlier Tuesday, Putin ordered troops involved in a military exercises in western Russia, close to the border with Ukraine, back to their bases. He said armed men who had seized buildings and other facilities in Crimea were local groups.
But in a sign of the fragility of the situation in Crimea, a Russian soldier fired three volleys of shots over the heads of unarmed Ukrainian servicemen who marched bearing the Ukrainian flag toward their aircraft at a military airfield surrounded by Russian troops at Belbek, near Sevastopol.
After a standoff in which the two commanders shouted at each other and Russian soldiers leveled rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers at the Ukrainians, the incident was defused and the Ukrainians eventually dispersed. No one was hurt.