Obama to Putin: Stay out or economy pays

President Barack Obama, speaking Tuesday at the Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague, said he is concerned that Russia will move deeper into Ukraine.
President Barack Obama, speaking Tuesday at the Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague, said he is concerned that Russia will move deeper into Ukraine.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - With no sign of Russia abandoning the Crimean Peninsula, President Barack Obama said Tuesday that he’s concerned Moscow will move deeper into Ukraine and warned Russian President Vladimir Putin that the international community is prepared to impose more sanctions against his country’s economy.

Obama stood fast on his insistence that Crimea remains a part of Ukraine, even as the fledgling Ukrainian government in Kiev ordered its troops to pull back from the disputed territory. Speaking at the international Nuclear Security Summit, Obama dismissed Russia as a “regional power” that was acting from a position of weakness.

“We’re not recognizing what is happening in Crimea,” Obama said at his first news conference since Russia annexed Crimea after a referendum March 16. Obama rejected “the notion that a referendum sloppily organized over the course of two weeks” would “somehow be a valid process.”

“We also are concerned about further encroachment by Russia into Ukraine,” Obama said, as he took questions in a joint appearance with his host, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

“I think that will be a bad choice for President Putin to make,” Obama said. “But ultimately he is the president of Russia, and he’s the one who’s going to be making that decision.”

photo

AP

Emergency workers applaud at a meeting Tuesday with Russian Emergency Situations Minister Vladimir Puchkov in Simferopol, Crimea. Puchkov met with local emergency officials and said that Russia sent diesel generators to Crimea to serve as a backup in case of power failures. Ukraine briefly cut energy supplies to the region.

Rutte said he could not envision the crisis over Ukraine ending in a military conflict. “I don’t think that is likely. I don’t think anybody wants it,” Rutte said as he stood next to Obama.

The pair spoke a day after the U.S. and its partners in the Group of Seven economic forum declared they were indefinitely suspending cooperation with Russia, which often joins with the G-7 nations to form the Group of Eight. The leaders also said they were prepared to impose new sanctions on key sectors of the Russian economy, including its energy and defense industries.

The U.S. already has imposed asset freezes and visa bans on 31 Russians, Ukrainians and Crimeans, including political and business figures close to Putin. The 28-nation European Union has put 51 people on its blacklist, including some on the U.S. roster, while stopping short of punishing businessmen.

Rutte said Tuesday that the new sanctions being considered “would hit Russia very badly.”

“And obviously, you can never guarantee that the people in Europe, in Canada, in the U.S. would not be hurt,” the prime minister said. “But obviously, we will make sure that we will design these sanctions in such a way that they will have maximum impact on the Russian economy and not on the European, the Canadian, the Japanese or the American economy.”

While Putin did not attend the long-planned Nuclear Security Summit, his actions in Ukraine dominated the two days of talks in The Hague. Western nations have used their long-planned meetings there to project a united front, hoping diplomatic and political isolation might prevent Putin from moving farther into eastern and southern Ukraine.

Russia has amassed thousands of troops on its border near those regions, raising anxieties in Washington, as well as in other former Soviet territories. Obama sought to reassure some of those nations that NATO would go to the defense of any member of the 28-nation alliance.

“We will act in their defense against any threats,” Obama said. “That’s what NATO is all about. When it comes to a potential military response, that is defined by NATO membership.”

But, Obama said, “Russia has a right legally to have its troops on its own soil.”

Obama arrived in the Netherlands, the first stop on a week-long trip abroad, facing criticism from Republicans who said the president underestimated Putin or misjudged the Russian leader’s intentions.

Among those critics is Obama’s former presidential rival Mitt Romney. The GOP politician declared during the 2012 campaign that Russia was America’s top geopolitical foe - an assertion Obama dismissed as a relic of Cold War-era thinking.

Obama took aim at Romney’s assertion again Tuesday, using the opportunity to cast Russia as little more than a “regional power” that does not threaten the U.S.

“Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors - not out of strength, but out of weakness,” Obama said. He said he continued to be more concerned about “the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan,” than about a national security threat from Russia.

Still, he added that “it would be dishonest to suggest there is a simple solution to what has already taken place in Crimea,” where Russian troops are in control.

UKRAINIAN SOLDIERS MOVE OUT

In a sign of how difficult it would be to roll back Russia’s advances, Ukrainian soldiers in Crimea piled onto buses and began their journey to Ukrainian territory Tuesday after a withdrawal order from the central government in Kiev.

Troops were given the choice of either staying in Crimea and switching allegiance to serve under Russia’s military, or leaving the peninsula to keep their jobs with the Ukrainian defense forces.

“The Russians threatened, intimidated, bullied and tried to get us to switch sides to Russia. It has been very difficult to resist this enormous pressure but I have made a choice that I can live with,” Senior Lt. Anatoly Mozgovoy said after arriving in the Ukrainian city of Genichesk.

“We were greeted as heroes in Ukraine. I was able to breathe freely for the first time in months,” said Mozgovoy, 30.

He said he left behind his wife and 7-month-old daughter, who were staying with his mother-in-law in Crimea until he finds out where he is being permanently deployed.

So far, 131 Ukrainian marines have left Crimea, the Defense Ministry said. They were being temporarily stationed at a military barracks in Genichesk, but their final destination was still unclear.

Also Tuesday, Ukraine’s defense minister stepped down over harsh criticism for authorities’ hesitant reaction to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The order to withdraw from Crimea was issued Monday, a week after many bases had already been stormed and seized by pro-Russian forces.

In an address to the parliament in the capital, Kiev, Defense Minister Igor Tenyukh denied that he had failed to issue clear instructions to his troops but reserved the right to resign. Lawmakers initially refused Tenyukh’s resignation but later accepted it and replaced him with Col. Gen. Mykhailo Koval.

The change occurred as Ukraine’s new government struggled to consolidate control amid signals of discontent from Right Sector. The nationalist movement played a key role in the anti-government demonstrations that prompted President Viktor Yanukovych to flee to Russia in February.

One radical, Oleksandr Muzychko, was shot dead overnight as he was being detained by police, the Interior Ministry said Tuesday.

Moscow has cited the purported influence of nationalist groups like Right Sector to justify its hasty annexation of Crimea, which has a large Russian majority. Putin said the nationalists posed a danger to the Russian-speakers in Crimea.

Police said Muzychko was being sought for organized-crime links, hooliganism and threatening public officials.

Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh lashed out at his killing.

“We cannot silently watch as the Interior Ministry carries out active anti-revolutionary activities,” Yarosh said.

His group demanded the immediate resignation of Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and the arrest of the head of the Sokol special forces.

AID PACKAGE

During the country’s political turmoil, Obama and European leaders have been discussing ways to boost funding for financially strained Ukraine.

The International Monetary Fund is set to make an announcement today after talks about a bailout loan for Ukraine, Finance Minister Oleksandr Shlapak said. A team was completing talks in Kiev on a loan that Shlapak said would amount to between $15 billion and $20 billion.

In Washington, Senate Democrats signaled a retreat over the biggest sticking point blocking congressional passage of legislation for an aid package. The Senate and House had been at odds over a provision related to the International Monetary Fund.

But with tens of thousands of Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s border, Senate Democrats decided it was more important to denounce Russia, codify sanctions against Putin’s inner circle and aid Ukraine rather than push right now for changes at the IMF.

The IMF provisions would have increased the power of emerging countries in the IMF and shifted some $63 billion from a crisis fund to a general account the lending body could use for economic stabilization operations around the world.

Republicans have long spurned the administration’s attempt to ratify the IMF revisions, saying they would increase the exposure of U.S. taxpayers in foreign bailouts. Making the shift now, opponents argue, also would marginally increase Russia’s voting power over the fund’s finances.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he strongly supports an IMF overhaul, but the main thing is to get the aid to Ukraine.

“We have to get IMF reform. But we can’t hold up the other,” Reid said Tuesday, adding that the White House was disappointed about removing the IMF language. “As much as I think a majority of the Senate would like to have gotten that done with IMF in it, it was headed to nowhere in the House.”

The Senate set a vote on the altered bill for Thursday. The House Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday approved its version of the measure.

Information for this article was contributed by Jim Kuhnhenn, Julie Pace, Juergen Baetz, Deb Reichmann, Bradley Klapper, Adam Pemble, Peter Leonard, Yuras Karmanau, Nataliya Vasilyeva and Karl Ritter of The Associated Press; by Michael D. Shear and Alison Smale of The New York Times; and by Julianna Goldman, Mike Dorning, Daria Marchak, Fred Pals, Corina Ruhe, Jonathan Tirone and Patrick Donahue of Bloomberg News.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/26/2014

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