WASHINGTON/SIMFEROOL: US President Barack Obama has warned Russia against any military intervention in Ukraine after the country’s new leaders accused Moscow of deploying forces in the Crimea region.
A week after Russian-backed President Viktor Yanukovich was ousted in Kiev, armed men took control of two airports in Crimea yesterday in what Kiev described as an invasion and occupation by Moscow’s forces in a region with an ethnic Russian majority.
Acting President Oleksander Turchinov said Russia, which has a naval base in Crimea, was following a scenario like the one before it went to war with fellow former Soviet republic Georgia in 2008 over two breakaway regions.
The crisis, which began after Yanukovich triggered protests by spurning a political and trade deal with the European Union, is stoking tensions in a geopolitical battle between East and West that has echoes of the Cold War.
“We are now deeply concerned by reports of military movements taken by the Russian Federation inside of Ukraine,” Obama told reporters in Washington.
“The United States will stand with the international community in affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine.”
Any violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity would be “deeply destabilizing,” he said.
Obama and European leaders would consider skipping a G8 summit this summer in the Russian city of Sochi if Moscow intervened militarily, a senior US official said.
The G8 includes the world’s seven leading industrial nations and Russia, and Russian President Vladimir Putin considers hosting such events as a way to show how far Russia has come since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
Washington’s relations with Moscow are already cool because of differences over the conflict in Syria, Putin’s record on human rights and Russia’s decision to harbour former US spy agency contractor Edward Snowden.
Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, dismissed the criticism, saying any movements of its forces in Crimea were in line with agreements with Ukraine.
Gunmen have taken over the regional parliament in Crimea, and control the main international airport and a military airfield on the strategic Black Sea peninsula.
A representative of Acting President Turchinov said 13 Russian aircraft had landed with 150 personnel on each plane. The Ukrainian leadership also said more than 10 Russian military helicopters flew over Crimea, and Russian servicemen blockaded a unit of the Ukrainian border guard near the port city of Sevastopol, home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet.
A local television station reported that another military aerodrome had been taken over by armed men overnight, but the report was not independently confirmed.
Phone lines have been severed in some areas and witnesses say they have seen armoured personnel carriers on the move.
There has been no bloodshed and no military clashes despite a warning by Ukraine’s Defence Ministry that “radical forces” planned to disarm Ukrainian military units in Crimea.
Ukraine’s leaders say about 100 people were killed, some of them by police snipers, during protests in the Ukrainian capital Kiev that began last November. (Reuters)
