The Group of Seven major powers decided to hold a summit in Brussels in June instead of a planned Group of Eight meeting in Sochi, Russia, in the latest sanction against Russia for President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea.
“We will suspend our participation in the G-8 until Russia changes course,” President Barack Obama and his fellow G-7 leaders said in a statement after a meeting in The Hague on Monday evening on the sidelines of a nuclear summit. “This clear violation of international law is a serious challenge to the rule of law around the world and should be a concern for all nations.”
The U.S. and its allies have expressed growing concern that Russia is building up its forces on the border with Ukraine after taking control of the Black Sea peninsula. It’s the worst standoff between the former Cold War enemies since the Soviet Union collapsed. Ukraine said Monday that it deployed more troops to the frontier.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dismissed the G-7 move. “The G-8 is an informal club without memberships,” he told reporters in The Hague. “If Western nations feel that the formula of G-8 no longer works, so be it.”
Besides the U.S., the G-7 includes Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan.
In an unexpected development, Lavrov met separately in The Hague with his Ukrainian counterpart, Andriy Deshchytsia, the highest level of contact between the two nations since Russia moved forces into Crimea nearly a month ago. U.S. officials said they welcomed the meeting but challenged Russia to take further steps to de-escalate the conflict.
Russia wants its neighbor to adopt a federal constitution that guarantees political and military neutrality, grants powers to Ukrainian region and makes Russian a second official language.
“Ukraine needs wide-scale constitutional reform with the participation of all regions,” Lavrov told reporters. “We can’t force this on Ukraine’s leaders, but that’s our assessment of the situation.”
After Putin completed the annexation of Crimea and the two sides exchanged sanctions, attention has shifted to whether Russia will seek to claim other parts of Ukraine. U.S. officials have warned of Russian troop reinforcements, raising concerns that the country may be preparing to carve off more areas of the east and south.
“As long as Russia is flagrantly violating international law and the order the G-7 has helped to build since the end of the Cold War, there’s no need for the G-7 to engage with Russia,” U.S. deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters before the G-7 talks. “We’re looking to send a message that we’re not done with building out the types of sanctions that we would impose on Russia for its actions.”
The U.S. is seeking to put pressure on Russia’s equity and currency markets, Rhodes said in an interview.
“We’re careful to calibrate it,” he said. “We’re not seeking to totally collapse the Russian economy.”
The European Union expanded its list of Russians and Ukrainians punished with asset freezes and travel bans to 51 on Friday. The U.S. widened its list to 27 Russians and four Ukrainians the previous day. Obama also authorized potential future penalties on Russian industries, including financial services, energy, metals and mining, defense and engineering.
“These sanctions wouldn’t only hurt the Russian economy, they could also have an impact on the global economy,” Obama said in an interview with Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant published Monday. “We would have preferred it not come to this. But Russia’s actions are simply unacceptable. There have to be consequences. And if Russia continues to escalate the situation, weneed to be prepared to impose a greater cost.”
In turn, Russia on Monday banned entry to 13 Canadian lawmakers and officials.
The Russian list includes Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s aides Christine Hogan and Wayne Wouters; House of Commons Speaker Andrew Scheer; Peter Van Loan, the government leader in the House of Commons; Sen. Raynell Andreychuk; and other lawmakers.
“Europe and America are united in our support of the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian people,” Obama said at a news conference with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. “We’re united in imposing a cost on Russia for its actions.”
In another attempt to alienate Russia from the international community, Obama held a separate meeting Monday with Chinese President Xi Jinping, whose country frequently sides with Moscow in disputes with the West.
The United States has been appealing to China’s vehement opposition to outside intervention in other nations’ domestic affairs and scored a symbolic diplomatic gain when Beijing abstained a week ago from voting on a United Nations Security Council resolution declaring Crimea’s secession referendum illegal. With Russia vetoing the measure and the 13 other council members voting in favor, China’s abstention served to isolate Moscow internationally.
“I believe ultimately that by working together, China and the United States can help strengthen international law and respect for the sovereignty of nations and establish the kind of rules internationally that allow all peoples to thrive,” Obama said while standing alongside Xi before their hour-long meeting.
In a counterpoint to Obama and his G-7 partners, a group of five major emerging economies - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - issued a statement Monday opposing sanctions and urging nations to work through the U.N. instead. The so-called BRICS nations said hostile language, sanctions and force do not “contribute to a sustainable and peaceful solution.”
UKRAINE ORDERS PULLOUT
Ukraine has so far mobilized more than 10,000 people for its army, with the priority being to protect its borders and complete the withdrawal of forces from Crimea, the head of the country’s Security Council, Andriy Parubiy, told a news conference in Kiev.
Ukraine’s acting president, Oleksandr Turchnynov, whose new government in Kiev has struggled to maintain control and cohesion, signed a decree Monday ordering the withdrawal of all servicemen in Crimea to Ukraine’s mainland. But in remarks that seemed to underline the disarray that has characterized the Ukrainian authorities, Defense Ministry spokesman Vladislav Seleznyov later stated he had heard about no such order.
Speaking in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, Turchnynov said troops would be evacuated with their families in response to threats from what he called occupying Russian forces.
The Ukrainian military has declined to specify the precise number of soldiers in Crimea before its annexation. But Oleksandr Rozmaznin, deputy chief of operations for Ukraine’s armed forces, said Monday that about half the troops in Crimea may have defected to the Russians.
“A corridor will be created in order to pull out our troops,” Rozmaznin said, adding that the retreating troops will cross the two slender isthmuses that link Crimea to the Ukrainian mainland. Negotiations were still ongoing about whether the troops would redeploy with their weaponry, he said.
He was vague about how long the redeployment could take but said the goal was to retreat without “fighting or using weapons.”
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visited Crimea on Monday to inspect the Black Sea Fleet, which has been stationed there under a deal with Ukraine that allowed Moscow to have up to 25,000 troops in the peninsula.
Shoigu met with Ukrainian servicemen, explaining the benefits they will have if they join the Russian military.
He also named the former head of Ukraine’s navy, Denis Berezovsky, as deputy commander of the Black Sea Fleet. Berezovsky was appointed commander of Ukraine’s navy on March 1, only to surrender the country’s base in Sevastopol to pro-Russian forces a day later. Authorities in Kiev have charged him with treason.
Also in Crimea, Russian forces stormed the Feodosia naval base at 4:30 a.m. Monday, Seleznyov said on Channel 5 television.
Two injured servicemen were taken captive earlier in the day and as many as 80 were detained at the site.
In Donuzlav Bay in western Crimea, dozens of Ukrainian sailors marooned on the Konstantin Olshanskiy navy landing vessel abandoned ship Monday after weeks of tension and uncertainty. The Olshanskiy and two other warships have been trapped in the bay since Russian forces scuttled mothballed ships at the bay’s inlet.
The sailors, using a small rubber boat that needed several trips to ferry them to land, were greeted by the taunts of hecklers on the shore.
One man shouted they were deserting “rats,” while another man blasted the Russian national anthem from his car.
“We aren’t rats, we aren’t running,” said one sailor, who only gave his first name of Yevgeny to discuss a sensitive subject. “Why should we have stayed, what would we have accomplished?”
Twenty out of the estimated 60 sailors originally on board remained on the ship, which was later in the day stormed by armed men, presumed to be Russian forces.
Additionally, a power failure plunged much of the Crimean capital, Simferopol, into darkness Monday, the second partial blackout in two days, as the Ukrainian government in Kiev appeared to retaliate against Russia’s occupation and annexation of the peninsula by sharply cutting electricity supplied from the mainland.
Homes and businesses went dark across a large swath of the city, underscoring the vulnerability of the geographically isolated peninsula, which is dependent on mainland Ukraine for many vital services, including electricity and much of its water supply.
Officials in Crimea and Moscow had anticipated such a move by the Ukrainian government. In recent days, regional officials said they had acquired 900 generators to provide electricity to vital buildings, including hospitals. It was not immediately clear if those generators were in use.
SENATE TAKES UP BILL
In the U.S., the Senate voted 78-17 Monday to formally take up legislation to aid Ukraine and sanction Russia.
Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., voted in favor of taking up the legislation, while Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., voted against it.
“Time is of the essence if we’re going to send a message to Russia,” said Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., who will try to attach an amendment expanding sanctions to Rosoboron export, a Russian firm that handles the nation’s exports of military equipment. Coats specifically would block the government of Afghanistan from using U.S. military aid to buy Russian helicopters.
While the vote showed considerable bipartisan support, bolstered by the votes of some Republicans who spent last week’s congressional recess in Ukraine, its ultimate fate is uncertain. Conservatives remain opposed to an overhaul of the International Monetary Fund’s governance structure, which would expand Ukraine’s borrowing limit at the fund but, many Republicans say, would also diminish the United States’ authority and increase Russia’s.
The Senate legislation would guarantee $1 billion in loans to the shaky, fledgling government in Kiev and offer an additional $100 million in direct aid. It would also offer $50 million to strengthen democratic institutions, to improve the rule of law and civic organizations, and to help the Ukraine government recover assets stolen by the former, and now-deposed, government.
The House already passed a Ukraine aid package without the IMF language and without sanctions on Russia. Under criticism from Senate Republicans, the House is likely to pass legislation this week similar to the Senate’s except it would again exclude the IMF language.
Information for this article was contributed by Mike Dorning, Julianna Goldman, Daryna Krasnolutska, John Walcott, Torrey Clark, Ilya Arkhipov, Stepan Kravchenko, Fred Pals, Patrick Donahue,Aliaksandr Kudrytski, Volodymyr Verbyany, Daria Marchak, Ye Xie and Ian Wishart of Bloomberg News; by Jonathan Weisman, David M. Herszenhorn and Neil MacFarquhar of The New York Times; and by Julie Pace, Jim Kuhnhenn, Mike Corder, Juergen Batz, Laura Mills, Peter Leonard, Bradley Klapper and Vladimir Isachenkov of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/25/2014