U.S., NATO again warn Russia

Kerry: Nobody fooled - Moscow behind Ukraine unrest

Members of a special police unit guard the regional administration building in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Tuesday.
Members of a special police unit guard the regional administration building in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Tuesday.

DONETSK, Ukraine - As the government in Kiev moved to reassert control over pro-Russian protesters across eastern Ukraine, the United States and NATO on Tuesday issued stern warnings to Moscow about further intervention in the country’s affairs amid continuing fears of an eventual Russian incursion.

Secretary of State John Kerry accused the Kremlin of fomenting the unrest, calling the protests the work of saboteurs whose machinations were as “ham-handed as they are transparent.”

Speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he added: “No one should be fooled - and believe me, no one is fooled - by what could potentially be a contrived pretext for military intervention just as we saw in Crimea. It is clear that Russian special forces and agents have been the catalysts behind the chaos of the last 24 hours.”

The secretary-general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said Russia would be making a “historic mistake” by going into Ukraine, and he urged the Kremlin to “step back.” At a news conference in Paris, he said any such actions “would have grave consequences for our relationship with Russia” and “would further isolate Russia internationally.”

In Moscow, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, on Tuesday denied the accusations of Russian meddling in Ukraine. He said Russia would seek talks on the Ukrainian political crisis that could involve the United States, the European Union and “all the political forces in Ukraine,” which should include representatives of the southeastern region.

A successful operation to expel pro-Russian demonstrators from a government building in Kharkiv was announced by Ukraine’s acting interior minister, Arsen Avakov, who had traveled to the city to supervise the action. He wrote on Facebook that the building was retaken “without firing a shot, grenades, or other special weapons” and that the troops were part of a broader redeployment in the region to contain unrest that Ukraine has accused Russia of orchestrating.

Pro-Russian demonstrators seized government buildings Sunday in several eastern cities, including Kharkiv, Donetsk and Lugansk, posing a thorny challenge for the authorities in Kiev. Russian armed forces are deployed along the border nearby, and the Kremlin has warned that it is prepared to intervene again in Ukraine to protect the many ethnic Russians who live there, as it has in Crimea in the south.

The Russian Foreign Ministry issued a stern statement in response to the use of Ukrainian Interior Ministry troops, accusing the Ukrainian government of embedding nationalist militants from the group Right Sector, as well as private U.S. mercenaries from a company called Greystone, in its forces in the east. The Russian statement said the U.S. contractors were being disguised as members of a Ukrainian military unit called Falcon.

Academi, a private U.S. security company affiliated with Greystone that was once known as Blackwater and became notorious for its military contracting work in Iraq, issued a statement in mid-March saying its employees were not working in Ukraine, after similar allegations surfaced in the Russian media. The company did not immediately respond to the Foreign Ministry’s statement Tuesday.

The ministry, which has repeatedly denounced the government in Kiev as the illegitimate product of a coup, warned against the use of military force in eastern Ukraine. “We call immediately for the halt of any military preparations, which risk the outbreak of civil war,” it said in its statement.

The seizures of government buildings in the east present a particular public relations challenge for the Ukrainian government, because its supporters used similar tactics in the capital to drive former President Victor Yanukovych from office.

The Ukrainian authorities were able to retake control of the headquarters of the security services in Donetsk but remained in a standoff with the demonstrators occupying the regional administration building. Several thousand people remained on the streets there Tuesday.

Information for this article was contributed by Noah Sneider and Michael R. Gordon of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 6 on 04/09/2014

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