RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - President Vladimir Putin of Russia called President Barack Obama on Friday to discuss a proposal by Obama for a diplomatic resolution to the crisis in Ukraine, and the two leaders agreed that their chief diplomats should meet soon to explore it, the White House and Kremlin said.
In a statement from the White House, officials said the telephone call from the Russian president had followed a proposal presented by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, during talks at The Hague, Netherlands, this week.
U.S. officials did not describe details about the proposal but said that Obama had told Putin during the call that the United States would like to see a diplomatic solution that involves Russia pulling back its troops from the Crimean Peninsula and not making any further steps to invade other parts of Ukraine.
The statement said Obama, who was visiting Saudi Arabia on Friday, had “urged Russia to support thisprocess and avoid further provocations, including the buildup of forces on its border with Ukraine.”
White House officials said Obama and Putin had agreed during the call that Kerry and Lavrov would meet soon “to discuss next steps.”
Earlier Friday, Russia dismissed as “counterproductive” a United Nations resolution condemning its takeover of Crimea, and Obama said Putin is misreading U.S. policy on the Ukraine crisis.
The Foreign Ministry in Moscow said Friday that abstentions and absences by U.N. General Assembly members in voting on Thursday’s nonbinding resolution, which declared Crimea’s March 16 ballot to leave Ukraine and join Russia as “having no validity,” showed that not all countries support that view.
Backed by coverage from Russian state-run news channels that depict Ukraine as spiraling into chaos, Putin’s government argues that the annexation of Crimea saved the region from being overrun by fascists who have taken control in Kiev and are oppressing the country’s Russian-speaking minority.
U.S. officials have warned that a buildup of troops on Ukraine’s eastern border poses a risk that Russia will seek to carve off more of Ukraine’s east and south.
“You would have thought that after a couple decades that there’d be an awareness on the part of any Russian leader that the path forward is not to revert back,” Obama said early Friday on This Morning on CBS. Putin “may be entirely misreading the West. He’s certainly misreading American foreign policy.”
Russia’s military, energy and financial industries are possible targets for furthersanctions if it moves deeper into Ukraine, Obama said Friday.
Of the 169 countries present for Thursday’s U.N. vote, 100 were in favor of the resolution calling on all states not to recognize “any alteration of the status” of Crimea. Russia was joined by Belarus, North Korea, Cuba, Syria, Venezuela, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Bolivia, Armenia and Nicaragua in voting against, while 58 countries abstained.
“The wide range of positions among U.N. member states, the large number of abstentions and those not attending the vote serve as expressive testimony to the rejection of the one-sided version of what happened in Ukraine,” the Foreign Ministry in Moscow said in a statement.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel rejected that view Friday.
“If I were in Russia’s position, I wouldn’t be very happy,” she said at a joint news conference in Berlin with Chinese President Xi Jinping. “All in all, this was a very clear vote that the global community isn’t very happy with what Russia has done.”
Also Friday, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu told Putin that the Ukrainian military withdrawal from Crimea was complete. Ukrainian soldiers were seen carrying duffel bags and flags as they shipped out of the Black Sea peninsula that Russia has annexed.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s fugitive leader pushed Friday for a vote to determine the status of each of the country’s regions.
The statement from Viktor Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian president who fled to Russia last month after three months of protests, raised the threat of more unrest in Ukraine’s Russian-speaking eastern provinces, where many resent the new Ukrainian government.
Deep divisions between Ukraine’s Russian-speaking eastern regions, where many favor close ties with Moscow, and the Ukrainian-speaking west, where most want to integrate into Europe, continue to fuel tensions.
Russia has pushed strongly for federalizing Ukraine - giving its regions more autonomy - but Ukraine’s interim authorities in Kiev have rejected such a move.
Information for this article was contributed by Anna Andrianova, Roger Runningen, Daryna Krasnolutska, Daria Marchak, Sangwon Yoon, Kristen Schweizer, Ilya Khrennikov, Rainer Buergin and Patrick Donahue of Bloomberg News; by Jim Heintz and Vladimir Isachenkov of The Associated Press; and by Michael D. Shear and David M. Herszenhorn of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 7 on 03/29/2014