Russia Stays in Ukraine

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russian army ukraineRussia justified its intervention in the Crimea as a legitimate response to a request from Ukraine’s ousted president amid threats posed by extremists, while Western leaders sought to keep the standoff from spiraling into war.

The U.S. condemned what it called a breach of Ukraine’s sovereignty after Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, said yesterday the crisis is creating serious risks to Russian security and to the safety of millions of Russian-speakers in southeastern Ukraine. Russia ended a military drill on time yesterday.

Ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych wrote to Russian PresidentVladimir Putin requesting a military deployment, Churkin said.

“It’s completely legitimate under Russian law, and given the extraordinary situation in Ukraine, this threat and the threat to our compatriots, Russian citizens and the Black Sea Fleet,” Churkin told a meeting of the UN Security Council in New York, reading out loud the March 1 letter from Yanukovych.

Crimea, where ethnic Russians comprise the majority, has become the focal point of the crisis after an uprising in Kiev caused Yanukovych to flee to Russia. Ukraine has mobilized its army and requested foreign observers after Russian forces took control of the peninsula, where Russia keeps its Black Sea fleet at Sevastopol. Russian forces had ordered Ukrainian warships in Crimea to surrender, Ukraine’s acting President Oleksandr Turchynov said yesterday.

Troop Presence

Russia has 16,000 troops in the Crimea region, while an accord allows it to have as many as 25,000, Churkin said.

Putin oversaw the end of military drills in western Russia yesterday and order soldiers to return to their bases, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. The exercises, which included fighter jets and tanks near the border with Ukraine, weren’t connected to the events in the neighboring country, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Feb. 26.

U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power struck back at Churkin, saying during yesterday’s Security Council meeting that his assertions were “without basis in reality” and that “Russian mobilization is a response to an imaginary threat.”

“Russian military action is not a human-rights protection mission,” Power said. “It is a violation of international law and a violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the independent nation of Ukraine, and a breach of Russia’s Helsinki commitments and UN obligations.”

Cold War

The Security Council met as the worst standoff between the West and Russia since the Cold War intensified, with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry set to arrive in Ukraine’s capital today.

Churkin said Russia’s decision to call an emergency Security Council meeting doesn’t mean Putin has decided to use armed force in Ukraine under the authorization of Russia’s parliament.

Russia’s claims that military moves in Ukraine are authorized and necessary to protect the country’s ethnic Russian population raise troubling new questions about Putin’s intentions toward Ukraine, said two U.S. intelligence officials who are monitoring the situation.

Crisis Escalation

The first, the officials said, is where Putin intends to stop — at regaining Crimea, at reestablishing Russian domination over parts of eastern Ukraine, at breaking the country in two roughly at the Dneiper River, where the capital Kiev is located, or not until Russian forces reach Ukraine’s border with Poland, a NATO member.

The second, said the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, is whether Putin is prepared to order his troops to fire on Ukrainian forces or civilians who resist or content to threaten the use of force.

Fiona Hill, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, a Washington policy group, said Russia could escalate the crisis and cited reports of Russian secret services helping organize rallies in other Ukrainian cities calling for Russian intervention.

“If they manage to stage scenes of mayhem” in other cities in eastern Ukraine, “and there are certain signs they may be able to do that, they now have blanket approval basically to sanction action on behalf of Russian peoples,” Hill said.

Obama Warning

The U.S. has suspended military ties with Russia because of the crisis and is urging Russian forces in Crimea to return to their bases, Navy Rear Admiral John Kirby said yesterday in a statement. The suspension affects military exercises, bilateral meetings, port visits and planning conferences, Kirby said.

The Pentagon is monitoring the situation closely, Kirby said. He added that there has been no change to U.S. military posture in Europe or the Mediterranean.

In Washington, President Barack Obama said the U.S. and allies were preparing sanctions to show Russia its actions will be “costly,” speaking to reporters yesterday before a White House meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“We are examining a whole series of steps — economic, diplomatic — that will isolate Russia” if it continues on its current course, said Obama, who spoke to Putin by telephone on March 1. One option he cited would be to send international monitors to “de-escalate the situation.”

International Law

Obama later held a two-your meeting with his national security council to discuss Ukraine.

Kerry said March 2 that Russia may lose its membership in the Group of Eight industrialized nations and raised the prospect of asset freezes, visa bans and trade disruptions.

The leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K. and U.S., along with the heads of the European Council and the European Commission said they wouldn’t resume preparations for the summit in Sochi, Russia, “until the environment comes back where the G-8 is able to have meaningful discussion.”

“We strongly urge that all parties exercise restraint, avoid the use of force, obey international law and respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine,” Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said in Tokyo today.

European Union foreign ministers met in Brussels and said they’re considering halting trade and visa-facilitation talks with Russia without a “de-escalation” in Ukraine. The bloc may impose sanctions that hurt Russia’s hydrocarbon industry, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said.

Securing Bailout

The Obama administration has halted bilateral trade and investment talks with Russia, Trevor Kincaid, a spokesman for the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office, said yesterday in an e-mail. As recently as December, Russian officials met with U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman to discuss the possibility of boosting trade between the two nations by increasing investment and standardizing regulations.

Increased military tensions have diverted the attention of U.S. and EU officials who have been racing to secure billions of dollars of bailout cash for Ukraine’s new government. A team from the International Monetary Fund arrived yesterday in Kiev and will spend a week assessing the country’s needs, according to First Deputy Managing Director David Lipton.

Ukraine needs $15 billion in the next 2 1/2 years to stay afloat, Finance Minister Oleksandr Shlapak said March 1. It’s seeking about $3 billion of financing in the first installment, according to a person with knowledge of the talks. Lipton said that the IMF is ready to provide support if Ukraine take steps to address some of its problems. The nation faces both economic and security challenges, Lipton said.

Treasuries Rally

The crisis is roiling global markets. Russia’s ruble weakened to a record low against the central bank’s dollar-euro basket even after policy makers unexpectedly raised their benchmark rate by 150 basis points to 7 percent yesterday. The Micex stock index plunged 11 percent, the most since 2008, while bond yields jumped, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell almost 1 percent.

U.S. Treasuries rallied this week as investors sought the safest assets, while Brent crude rose as much as 3 percent. There have been no disruptions to oil shipments to Europe through the Druzhba pipeline that crosses Ukraine, a key east-west transit nation for Russian energy, OAO Transneft spokeswoman Natalya Kutsik said yesterday.

Ukraine’s hryvnia weakened 2 percent yesterday to 9.75 per dollar, while the yield on its dollar debt due 2023 soared 106 basis points to 10.506 percent, data compiled by Bloomberg showed.

Act of War

Putin claims extremists orchestrated a coup to dislodge Yanukovych and says Russian speakers in Ukraine’s east and south need protection. The Russian parliament has authorized Putin to use military force to protect Russians in Ukraine if they’re under threat.

Ukraine’s Turchynov has warned that a military invasion would be an act of war, saying Russians aren’t at risk. Ukraine’s border guards and Defense Ministry warned earlier that Russia’s military is strengthening its presence in Crimea, with servicemen confronting local army units, fighter jets violating airspace and more war ships arriving.

Russia doesn’t want a war and the situation “can normalize” if the new government “starts to resolve domestic problems in accordance with international law,” Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin told Russian state TV on March 2.

Unintended Escalation

“The biggest risk is of unintended escalation,” said Janine Davidson, a former U.S. deputy assistant defense secretary who’s now at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington policy group. She said many conflicts have been escalated accidentally by military commanders whose actions have had unintended consequences.

Crimea was given to Ukraine by Russia in 1954 by then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. People who identified themselves as ethnic Russian comprise 59 percent of Crimea’s population of about 2 million, with 24 percent Ukrainian and 12 percent Tatar, according to 2001 census data. Russians make up 17 percent of Ukraine’s entire population of 45 million.

If the situation did escalate, Putin would face a tougher challenge, Davidson said.

“If this does spiral out of control and we end up with an all-out civil war, we should prepared for humanitarian options,” Davidson said. “If there’s, God forbid, refugees flowing, we should be thinking through something like that.”

Bloomberg

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21 responses to “Russia Stays in Ukraine”

  1. 5thDrawer Avatar
    5thDrawer

    The ‘Direct Flight’ to Mars by the ‘Mars Society’ begins to look MUCH more viable. To get mixed-crews on the space station might become a little tricky … can The Shuttle be brought out of mothballs??
    Can you imagine a punch landing in weightlessness? The poor guy would bounce all over the place …

  2. 5thDrawer Avatar
    5thDrawer

    “starts to resolve domestic problems in accordance with international law”
    Getting rid of the money-sucking Yanukovych was the first step, obviously. As the ‘Mr. Flip-Flop’ of the Ukraine was going EURO-Trade until Putin said he didn’t like that. Which is when the starving masses, who thought they might have had a better future, decided something HAD to be done.
    Why Putin thinks he has to protect more than his Navy – and then threaten the Ukrainian army when it was doing the same job anyway by protecting against anarchists – only shows he shouldn’t be taking ‘advice’ from Churkin, who reads the ‘crying words’ coming (ostensibly) from the guy who’s palace was opened to public view for the first time.
    That Putin ‘joins’ his troops in a ‘war-games’ simply makes him look like The N. Korean Fat-boy …. maybe someone should tell him, since he doesn’t enjoy THAT image much, as we’ve seen.
    NOT giving ‘the new government’ some time to ‘normalize’ things – as it seems to have been doing – and setting soldier against soldier as Putin did, is almost bound to lead to a nervously pulled trigger. And that’s all it will need. I’m sure the Russians could have run rampant over the place anyway – if things had REALLY looked as if the Russian Race was in trouble. Which it wasn’t.

  3. MekensehParty Avatar
    MekensehParty

    Crisis over
    Russia held one day
    Troops are going home

    1. Russia went in to protect Russian citizens that live in Ukrainian which is it’s right to do so. Can you please explain to me again why the US went into Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and so on and so on and so on. And then came out with its tale between its legs. Can you explain why US sends drones all over the world killing innocent people. Oh that’s war against terrorism. At war with terror in one country and supplying them with weapons in another country.

      1. cook2half Avatar
        cook2half

        Protect them from what??

        1. MekensehParty Avatar
          MekensehParty

          Just let him rant, losers have nothing better to do…

      2. cook2half Avatar
        cook2half

        Protect them from what??

  4. MekensehParty Avatar
    MekensehParty

    Crisis over
    Russia held one day
    Troops are going home

  5. 5thDrawer Avatar
    5thDrawer

    Man, this ‘site’ slowed down ……

    1. MekensehParty Avatar
      MekensehParty

      Give them a break, he/she can have a life outside of this blog.
      We’re not the best company either 🙂

      1. 5thDrawer Avatar
        5thDrawer

        Watch BBC ‘live’ … only way to keep up with changes. :-)))
        Russian troops guarding Crimea’s Belbek air base fired into the air as unarmed Ukrainian soldiers previously stationed there marched towards them – wanting to get onto their own airfield.
        Elsewhere in Crimea, two Ukrainian warships are reported to be blocked by a Russian minesweeper in the port of Sevastopol.
        The Ukrainian navy headquarters in the city was surrounded by pro-Russian gunmen and civilians who formed a human chain.

        1. MekensehParty Avatar
          MekensehParty

          right but it’s over, he bowed.
          all of this is for the show, tomorrow he’ll go hunting deer and take some pictures for his facebook page but the government in Kiev (the Russian ultimate target and objective) stands and will not fall.
          Crimea’s fate and even secession is now a UN problem, the most important thing is that the Russian tanks do not roll in the capitals of eastern Europe again reinstating their dictator friends.
          C’est fini.

          1. 5thDrawer Avatar
            5thDrawer

            Need some interest in the actual history … The Crimea is as strange as any. 😉

            Russia’s historical links with the peninsula go back to Catherine the Great in the 18th Century, when Russia conquered southern Ukraine and Crimea, taking them from the Ottoman Empire. In 1954, Crimea was handed to Ukraine as a gift by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was himself half-Ukrainian. Only 10 years earlier, Joseph Stalin had deported Crimea’s entire Tatar population, some 300,000 people, allegedly for co-operating with Hitler’s Germany.When Ukraine became independent in 1991, Russian President Boris Yeltsin agreed that Crimea could remain in Ukraine, with Russia’s Black Sea fleet remaining at Sevastopol under lease. That lease was in recent years extended to 2042.
            Under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the US, Russia, Ukraine and the UK agreed not to threaten or use force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine. They also pledged never to use economic coercion to subordinate Ukraine to their own interest.

            There is an ethnic Russian majority in Ukraine’s autonomous republic of Crimea. Russia’s Black Sea fleet is based at Sevastopol, where much of the population have Russian passports. But the US insists there is no legal basis for the Russian move, accusing Moscow of acting unilaterally in violation of its commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty. The G7 group of leading economies agrees.
            Under the terms of its agreement with Ukraine, Russia is entitled to have 25,000 troops on the peninsula and currently has an estimated 16,000 deployed there. But these troops have to remain on base. They are now in place across Crimea.

            Two groups, Right Sector and Svoboda (Freedom), are frequently mentioned and there are regular references to wartime nationalist Stepan Bandera, seen as a hero to some but accused by others of being a Nazi collaborator linked to massacres of Jews and Poles.
            The far right was a minority element in the protests that attracted a wide cross-section of support from Kiev and other cities. They were, however, often involved in the most violent confrontations and nationalist symbols were frequently visible in the square.
            The nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) party has four posts in the government. Oleksandr Sych is deputy prime minister and Oleh Makhnitsky becomes acting chief prosecutor. It also runs the agriculture and ecology portfolios but its leader, who has been accused of anti-Semitism, is not in the government.

            Part of the problem is that the government sworn in last week had little connection to Ukraine’s more Russophile east. One of its first actions was to repeal a 2012 law recognising Russian as an official regional language. The decision was widely criticised across Ukraine.
            (Shades of Quebec ;-))
            Is there a ‘humanitarian crisis’?
            There have been unconfirmed reports in Russian media of 675,000 Ukrainians streaming across the border into Russia since the start of the year. But one Russian TV report on the “humanitarian catastrophe” illustrated its story with a Polish border crossing unrelated to the crisis.
            (bit of propaganda – sound familiar? 😉

          2. MekensehParty Avatar
            MekensehParty

            Crimea is as Russian as the Sudetes were German.
            Hitler tanks rolled on the Sudetes in 36 for very similar reasons and annexed it with France and the UK signing on the annexation.
            This time the white house “dove” did not flinch and over the weekend gathered a first wave of peaceful counter attack that wiped out 11% of Russia’s economy.
            Monday afternoon the dove handed the bear a first “invoice” of his Ukrainian escapade.
            Times are changing…

          3. MekensehParty Avatar
            MekensehParty

            Crimea is as Russian as the Sudetes were German.
            Hitler tanks rolled on the Sudetes in 36 for very similar reasons and annexed it with France and the UK signing on the annexation.
            This time the white house “dove” did not flinch and over the weekend gathered a first wave of peaceful counter attack that wiped out 11% of Russia’s economy.
            Monday afternoon the dove handed the bear a first “invoice” of his Ukrainian escapade.
            Times are changing…

          4. Hind Abyad Avatar
            Hind Abyad

            Again ..giving wrong news on YaLibnan?

          5. 5thDrawer Avatar
            5thDrawer

            Wait for it. It will come.

        2. MekensehParty Avatar
          MekensehParty

          right but it’s over, he bowed.
          all of this is for the show, tomorrow he’ll go hunting deer and take some pictures for his facebook page but the government in Kiev (the Russian ultimate target and objective) stands and will not fall.
          Crimea’s fate and even secession is now a UN problem, the most important thing is that the Russian tanks do not roll in the capitals of eastern Europe again reinstating their dictator friends.
          C’est fini.

        3. Hind Abyad Avatar
          Hind Abyad

          BBC..CNN..home made 5 cents propaganda.

          Ukranian armed forces dispatched to Crimea started resigning
          on massive scale to turn themselves to the Crimean government.

          Ukrainian special forces regiment joined other units in refusal
          to march against Crimea

          Crimean air base pledges allegiance to the local authority.

          Ukranian Krivac class frigate flagship Herman Sahaydachny has
          refused to follow orders from Kiev and has come to Russia’s side
          after taking part in joint counter-piracy with Nato and the EU.

          Commander Ukranian Naval Forces Denis Berezowsky said Sunday
          that he swore allegiance to the Crimean people.

        4. Hind Abyad Avatar
          Hind Abyad

          BBC..CNN..home made 5 cents propaganda.

          Ukranian armed forces dispatched to Crimea started resigning
          on massive scale to turn themselves to the Crimean government.

          Ukrainian special forces regiment joined other units in refusal
          to march against Crimea

          Crimean air base pledges allegiance to the local authority.

          Ukranian Krivac class frigate flagship Herman Sahaydachny has
          refused to follow orders from Kiev and has come to Russia’s side
          after taking part in joint counter-piracy with Nato and the EU.

          Commander Ukranian Naval Forces Denis Berezowsky said Sunday
          that he swore allegiance to the Crimean people.

          Monument to soldiers who died liberating Ukraine from Nazis,
          toppled by Ukrainian neo-Nazis.

    2. MekensehParty Avatar
      MekensehParty

      Give them a break, he/she can have a life outside of this blog.
      We’re not the best company either 🙂

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