Kerry off to talk to Russian

Sides closer to crisis fix, Lavrov says

Secretary of State John Kerry rushes from his plane Saturday at the Paris airport after changing his travel plans to hold talks today on Ukraine with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Secretary of State John Kerry rushes from his plane Saturday at the Paris airport after changing his travel plans to hold talks today on Ukraine with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

KIEV, Ukraine - A day after Russian leader Vladimir Putin reached out to President Barack Obama to try to peacefully resolve the standoff over Ukraine,Secretary of State John Kerry scrambled his travel plans in order to meet with his Russian counterpart in Paris today, according to a State Department official.

In an apparent bid to quiet tensions, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Saturday that Russia and the United States and its Western allies were already narrowing their differences over a political and diplomatic solution to a crisis that intensified with Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea. The takeover amplified fears that Russia was massing troops on the border to seize more of Ukraine.

News of the diplomatic push came as Ukrainian leaders maneuvered ahead of a presidential election they hope will begin to calm the political upheaval that started with protests against then-president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted.

Vitali Klitschko, one of the best-known faces of the opposition to Yanukovych, said Saturday that he was abandoning his candidacy for president and would instead support the billionaire Petro Poroshenko.

photo

AP

A woman waves a Soviet navy flag as a crowd gathers near a railway clock tower in Simferopol late Saturday as Crimea prepares to switch to Moscow time, turning clocks ahead two hours at 2 a.m. today.

Both men led the protests against Yanukovych’s tilt toward Moscow and have said they seek a stronger democracy and a more pro-Western path for the country.

“The presidential elections in Ukraine on May 25 should join society and not become another war of everyone against everyone,” Klitschko said at a meeting of his political party, the United Democratic Alliance for Reform. “This can be achieved only if you do not split the votes between the democratic candidates.”

The move by Klitschko, who enjoys wide name recognition because of his fame as a former champion boxer, could propel Poroshenko to a commanding lead in the election, where his most prominent contender will likely be Yulia Tymoshenko, the country’s former prime minister and a familiar figure in the country’s tumultuous opposition movement.

Poroshenko, who also owns the popular Channel 5 television station and has served as foreign minister, already leads in the polls for the presidential election and is seen as likely to beat Tymoshenko, who declared last week that she will “be the candidate of Ukrainian unity.”

Poroshenko announced his candidacy to supporters Friday evening in his childhood hometown of Vinnytsia, holding up a religious icon of the Virgin Mary and child.

Speaking Saturday at the same congress as Klitschko, Poroshenko said Ukraine needed to unify in the face of aggression, a reference to Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

“Our goal is to live in a new way,” he said Saturday. “To shape Ukraine in a way that there will be rich, free and honest citizens that will be happy to be Ukrainians and to live in a country respected by the whole world.”

Both Klitschko, 42, and Poroshenko, 48, played prominent roles in the months-long protest movement that led to the toppling of Yanukovych in February. The demonstrations were sparked by Yanukovych’s decision to back away from closer ties with the European Union and turn toward Russia but grew to encompass widespread discontent with corruption and the lack of democratic freedoms.

“The only way to win is by nominating a single candidate from the democratic ranks,” Klitschko said. “This should be a candidate with the greatest support from the people.”

Klitschko said he would run instead for mayor of Kiev with a goal of transforming the city into a “truly European capital.”

Lavrov and Kerry spoke by telephone Saturday after Obama and Putin had promised new diplomacy. After the phone call, Kerry delayed his return to the United States and headed for Paris to meet Lavrov today.

Obama told Putin that a diplomatic solution “remains possible only if Russia pulls back its troops and does not take any steps to further violate Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty,” the White House said Friday.

While in Paris, Kerry may also meet separately with the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius.

State Department spokesman Jennifer Psaki on Saturday confirmed the day and general time of the Kerry-Lavrov meeting.

The White House didn’t detail what plans Kerry and Lavrov discussed. In previous meetings, Kerry called for talks between Russia and Ukraine’s government with international participation, and sending monitors into Ukraine, including Crimea. Russia would be able to keep its bases on the Black Sea peninsula as long as Ukraine’s sovereignty was respected.

Kerry had already been due to return Tuesday to Europe for a NATO foreign-ministers meeting and had been considering returning to the Middle East to continue a press to salvage foundering Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Kerry aides said the option of going to Israel, the Palestinian territories or Jordan remained a possibility.

Psaki said Saturday that Kerry would remain in close touch with Martin Indyk, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, and the negotiating team in Jerusalem and Ramallah, West Bank, in the event Kerry needs to return to the region from Paris in advance of NATO.

Also on Saturday, Lavrov said in a television interview that Russia had “no intention” of sending troops to Ukraine, according to a transcript.

“We are bringing our approaches closer together,” Lavrov said. “My last meeting with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in The Hague and my contacts with Germany, France and some other countries show that a possible joint initiative that could be offered to our Ukrainian partners is taking shape.”

Russia, the U.S. and EU nations are moving toward a joint initiative that may be submitted to Ukraine, Lavrov said Saturday in comments published on his ministry’s website. Russia wants Ukraine to grant greater powers to its regions, have a nonaligned status outside NATO and make Russian a second official language, he said.

The Russian solution emphasizes a federation - allowing for greater autonomy for eastern Ukraine, with its heavy concentration of ethnic Russians. The emphasis on a federation is seen partly as an attempt to ensure that Ukraine does not coalesce into a strong pro-European, anti-Russian country right next door.

Lavrov rejected as “absolutely unacceptable” the formula devised by Western officials, whereby Russia and Ukraine would negotiate directly with each other under Western auspices, Lavrov said. The Russians reject the current leadership in Kiev as illegitimate.

“Russia is trying to cement the status quo by providing assurances to the West that it won’t go further and invade Ukraine,” Fyodor Lukyanov, head of the Moscow-based Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, said by phone Saturday. “I don’t think Putin was planning to but Western leaders clearly feel that he’s stepping back because of the threat of more sanctions.”

The crisis began after Yanukovych turned last year against closer trade and other ties with the West under pressure from Russia.

On Saturday, Poroshenko hailed the decision by Klitschko to step aside in the presidential campaign, saying it would serve the goals of the thousands of people who demonstrated for more than three months in hopes of putting Ukraine on the path to a pro-Western political future.

“It would be a betrayal if we did not unite,” Poroshenko said in a speech Saturday to the United Democratic Alliance for Reform congress.

On Thursday, Tymoshenko announced that she would run for president as the candidate of the Fatherland party. Tymoshenko, Yanukovych’s arch-rival, spent 2½ years in prison on charges that her supporters and the West have long criticized as politically motivated. Yanukovych narrowly defeated her in Ukraine’s 2010 presidential election.

A spokesman for Tymoshenko, who was attending her own party congress Saturday, did not have an immediate response to Klitschko’s announcement.

Tymoshenko is by far the best-known politician in the race and a charismatic speaker. But she faces an uphill climb, given the public’s deep mistrust of anyone with long experience in government in a country with a history of corruption and mismanagement. Tymoshenko served twice as prime minister and has been a prominent political figure for more than a decade.

Meanwhile, leaders of Crimea’s Tatar minority gathered Saturday to condemn Russia’s annexation of the peninsula and appealed to international bodies for recognition as an autonomous group.

Tatars, an ethnically Turkic and mainly Muslim group subjected to mass deportation from their native Crimea by Soviet leader Josef Stalin in 1944, gathered to forge a collective response to Russia’s absorption of their native region.

Decisions on whether to accept Russian citizenship and possible participation in a Moscow-loyal government were deferred as the community further contemplates its options.

But the forum of about 250 delegates underscored difficulties Russia will face in integrating a community that resisted annexation and largely boycotted the March 16 referendum to join Russia.

The Kremlin’s decision to annex the strategic Black Sea region, which has a large Russian majority, was backed by rhetoric of national self-determination, as Moscow argued that pro-Russian Crimeans had the right to break away from Ukraine.

“Recently, all decisions [by Russia] have been based on the presupposed right of every nation to self-determination,” said Refat Chubarov, the leader of the Crimean Tatar governing body. “One must now conclude that the Crimean Tatar people also have that right.”

Chubarov also appealed to the international community to recognize the Crimean Tatars as a “national territorial autonomy,” but fell short of demanding a referendum on independence or allegiance to Ukraine.

Ukraine’s acting president, Oleksandr Turchynov, has vetoed a law that would have eliminated Russian as a second official language, with the government denying that the rights of Russian speakers are under threat.

Concern that Russia’s economy would suffer from an extended confrontation over Ukraine has helped push the benchmark Micex Index down 10.6 percent this year. The gauge lost 11 percent this quarter and entered a bear market in March.

Information for this article was contributed by Andrew Roth, David M. Herszenhorn, Neil Mac-Farquhar, Michael R. Gordon and Patrick Reevell of The New York Times; by Peter Leonard, Yuras Karmanau, Laura Mills and Matthew Lee of The Associated Press; by Mike Dorning, Daria Marchak, Daryna Krasnolutska, Volodymyr Verbyany, Sangwon Yoon, Kristen Schweizer, Ilya Khrennikov, Anna Andrianova, Rainer Buergin, Patrick Donahue, Roger Runningen, Margaret Talev and Larry Liebert of Bloomberg News.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/30/2014

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