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President Barack Obama, speaking from the South Lawn of the White House on Thursday, announced he will "impose additional costs" on Russia.Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
President Barack Obama on Thursday increased pressure on Russia over its annexation of Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, announcing additional economic sanctions against Moscow that will hit 20 Russian officials and a bank that provides them with support.
The sanctions are the latest in a wave of political and economic actions against Russia by the United States and the European Union after Russia moved to annex Crimea.
Obama also signed an executive order authorizing more severe sanctions that would affect "key sectors of the Russian economy" if necessary, though he noted the escalated sanctions could have a profound impact on the global economy.
The president said the penalties were the result of "choices the Russian government has made, choices that have been rejected by the international community."
The sanctions are the second wave of penalties the U.S. has levied on Russia this week, following economic sanctions ordered Monday on 11 people the U.S. said were involved in the dispute in Ukraine.
Moments after Obama's announcement Thursday, Russia issued its own wave of sanctions against U.S. officials, including deputy national security adviser Benjamin Rhodes; Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Mary Landrieu, D-La.; and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.
Russia’s sanctions restrict travel for the U.S. lawmakers and officials. The Russian Foreign Ministry also issued a statement indicating that it will retaliate to each round of U.S. sanctions.
"There will be no doubt: we will respond adequately to every hostile thrust," the ministry said in a statement.
The move comes as Russia faces further sanctions from the European Union on Thursday over the annexation.
In an address to the German parliament in Berlin, Chancellor Angela Merkel said the EU was readying further sanctions and that the G-8 forum of leading economies had been suspended indefinitely.
Russia holds the presidency of the G-8, and President Vladimir Putin was due to host his counterparts, including Obama, at a summit in Sochi in June.
"So long as there aren't the political circumstances, like now, for an important format like the G-8, then there is no G-8," Merkel said. "Neither the summit nor the format."
Moscow formally annexed Crimea earlier this week. The Black Sea peninsula had been part of Russia for centuries until 1954, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred it to Ukraine.
On Thursday Russia's 450-member State Duma, the lower house of parliament, approved the treaty signed by Putin and leaders of Crimea that makes the territory a part of Russia.
The treaty must still be approved by the 166-member Federation Council, the upper house, before Crimea is officially a part of Russia.
Russian forces effectively took control of Crimea some two weeks ago after the ouster of Ukraine's pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovich, following months of protests and sporadic violence.
The crisis erupted late last year after Yanukovich backed out of an association deal with the EU in favor of a promised $15 billion bailout from Russia. That angered Ukrainians from pro-European central and western regions.
Merkel said EU leaders would increase those "level two" sanctions against Russia when they meet later Thursday in Brussels to widen the list of those whose assets are being frozen and who are banned from traveling.
She also reiterated that if things worsen, the EU is prepared to move to "level three" measures, which would include economic sanctions.
"The European Council will make it clear today and tomorrow that with a further deterioration of the situation we are always prepared to take level three measures, and those will without a doubt include economic sanctions," she said.
Merkel's tough approach came as the commander of Ukraine's navy was freed after being held by Russian forces and local Crimean militia members at the navy's headquarters.
Rear Adm. Sergei Haiduk and an unspecified number of civilians were held for hours after the navy's base in Sevastopol was stormed Wednesday. Early reports said the storming was conducted by a self-described local defense force, but Thursday's statement by acting President Oleksandr Turchynov, which confirmed the release, said Russian forces were involved.
Just how many retreating troops Ukraine will have to absorb in what amounts to a military surrender of Crimea was unclear. Many servicemen have already switched sides to Russia, but authorities said they were prepared to relocate as many as 25,000 soldiers and their families to the Ukrainian mainland.
With thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and sailors trapped on military bases, surrounded by heavily armed Russian forces and pro-Russia militias, the Kiev government said it was drawing up plans to evacuate its outnumbered troops from Crimea back to the mainland and would seek United Nations support to turn the peninsula into a demilitarized zone.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon met with Putin, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other senior Kremlin officials on Thursday and expressed his concern over the continued escalations in the region.
"I am seriously concerned that developments in Ukraine and the increasing tensions between Ukraine and Russia pose grave risks to the countries themselves, the region and beyond," Ban said. "It is clear that that we are at a crossroad. We must employ every possible diplomatic tool at our disposal to solve this crisis, which has grave political and economic ramifications."
On Friday the secretary-general travels to Kiev, where he will hold talks with Turchynov, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and others to discuss the ongoing crisis in the region.
"We are working out a plan of action so that we can transfer not just servicemen but, first of all, members of their family who are in Crimea quickly and effectively to mainland Ukraine," said Andriy Parubiy, secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council.
Since the Russian forces took charge in Crimea, Ukrainian-enlisted personnel and officers have been bottled up in barracks and other buildings at one end of the Belbek air force base, with the Russians in control of the airfield.
"We're waiting for what Kiev, our leadership, tells us," said one major, who declined to give his name. The major said he expected about half of the personnel still at the base to accept the Russian offer to stay and join the Russian armed forces, since they are Crimea natives.
Humbled but defiant, Ukraine lashed out symbolically at Russia by declaring its intent to leave the Moscow-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose alliance of 11 former Soviet nations.
The last nation to leave the group was Georgia, which fought a brief war with neighboring Russia in 2008 and ended up losing two separatist territories.
WASHINGTON – A new equation in the Ukrainian crisis is a growing concern that ultra-nationalist Ukrainians could attack ethnic Russians.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has stated the ultra-nationalist threat is the reason for preparing to move Russian troops into the country.
The ultra-nationalists were instrumental in ousting pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, even though he turned down a European Union partnership agreement. Yanokuvych’s acceptance would have brought about austerity measures that the ultra-nationalists would have opposed.
They have shown an ability to operate among the tens of thousands of demonstrators in Kiev and are trained to confront security forces. They are equipped with helmets, masks, protective gear, weapons and Molotov cocktails.
Analysts say that the ultra-nationalist groups present a threat, since members are prepared and willing to confront security forces.
Lavrov’s rationale for Russia’s aggressive response is based on a change to Russian military doctrine implemented after the 2008 Russian-Georgian conflict that says Russia will send its troops anywhere to defend Russians.
After the 2008 war, Russia issued passports and granted citizenship to ethnic Russians in the captured Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both of which Russia later annexed.
The thrust of the doctrine could be interpreted as an open-ended means of committing “legal” aggression, since ethnic Russians occupy all of the independent countries that once comprised the Soviet Union.
There are ethnic Russians not only in Ukraine but in all of the Caucasus, Central Asia and in the former Soviet Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as Belarus, Poland and Finland.
‘Sieg heil’
The most prominent of the ultra-nationalist groups is the Pravy-Sektor, or Right Sector, whose leader now has called on Chechen Islamic militant chief Dokku Umarov to launch attacks in Russia.
Right Sector also opposes Russian influence in Ukraine. Its leader, Dmitry Yarosh, had threatened to send members to the Crimea to defend against Russian military intervention.
While Right Sector was involved in demonstrations that toppled Yanukovych, Yarosh, has let it be known that his group will resume violent demonstrations if the new interim government doesn’t deliver on the changes it promised.
Yarosh, however, was selected as a member of the National Security and Defense Council, which is part of the new interim government.
Right Sector and other ultra-national groups, such as Euromaidan, Patriot of Ukraine and White Hammer, are comprised mainly of males in their 20s and 30s who wear dark clothing and masks and are very aggressive during demonstrations.
The groups were directly involved in the beginning of demonstrations in January and occupied the Ukrainian presidential building and other government buildings.
One report said demonstrators hoisted Nazi SS and white power symbols on toppled memorials and destroyed a memorial to Ukrainians who died fighting German occupation during World War II.
The report said “sieg heil” salutes and the Nazi Wolfangel symbol was being displayed prominently in demonstrations in Maidan Square in Kiev, and neo-Nazi groups had established “autonomous zones” around the city.
Right Sector in particular is said to have wide support from the people throughout Ukraine.
“Right Sector’s emergence highlights how far-right and extremist groups can increase the impact of protects against autocratic regimes, political repression and austerity measures, sometimes effecting political change,” said a report by the open-intelligence group Stratfor.
Russia: U.S. doesn’t understand nuances
Lavrov further asserts that the West has sided with the ultra-nationalist groups, which he calls neo-Nazis, resulting in the violent government takeover.
Lavrov specifically accused U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry of helping to incite the groups, ignoring the excesses of what has been referred to as “militant Russophobic and anti-Semitic forces” inciting demonstrations in Kiev.
“Not bothering to make any effort to understand the complex processes occurring within Ukrainian society or make an objective assessment of the environment which is furthering the degradation following the forceful seizure of power in Kiev by radical extremists, Kerry operates with a Cold War stamp, offering not to punish those who carried out the government overthrow, but the Russian Federation,” a Russian foreign ministry statement said.
The statement said Moscow “further accused European powers of standing idly by while the ‘newly born Kiev regime’ trampled on the EU mediated agreement of February 21, in which Yanukovich reached a deal with the opposition to settle the crisis.”
“The ministry noted the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Poland had signed off on the document which was thrown out of the window when opposition forces seized power the next day. In the process, the West has effectively allied itself with neo-Nazis who are smashing up Orthodox churches and synagogues while “declaring war on the Russian language.”
The ‘real power’ in Ukraine
A knowledgeable Ukrainian source in Stanford, Calif, told WND the “real power in Kiev and much of Western Ukraine today belongs to several rival neo-Nazi factions whose masked, well-armed adherents are busy looting abandoned properties and shaking down businesses for money to support their ‘revolution.’”
“They have already made territorial demands to each of the countries bordering the Ukraine, including the NATO members Poland, Hungary and Romania, and they have declared their intention to acquire nuclear weapons,” the source said.
Other European neo-Nazi parties, such as Jobbik in Hungary and the Golden Dawn in Greece, are “amateurs compared to Ukraine’s Svoboda and Right Sector,” said the source.
The Ukrainian groups use “the same slogans and the same Nazi symbols they used in 1941-1944, when they butchered 200,000-300,000 Poles and Jews, and in 1945-1954, when they butchered in the most gruesome ways imaginable tens of thousands of peaceful Ukrainian citizens whose only crime was to refuse joining their ranks.”
“Today, much of Ukraine is frozen in horror, fearing that the neo-Nazis might unleash a bloodbath that would overshadow the crimes they committed in 1941-1954,” the source told WND.
He said many of the neo-Nazis’ current leaders collaborated with Chechen terrorists during the Chechens’ terror campaign against Russia in 1990s.
“We have no idea what awaits us next,” the source told WND. “Russia may be able to save the Crimea from the neo-Nazis, but it would probably not have enough muscle to save Ukraine proper.”
Sources say that Right Sector and the other ultra-nationalist groups are linked to a constellation of international neo-fascist groups through the Alliance of European National Movements.
‘Activate’ the fight
Right Sector leader Yarosh’s appeal to Chechen Islamic leader Umarov to act against Russia was posted on Right Sector’s VKontakte social network.
The message, signed by “leader of Right Sector Dmitry Yarosh,” called on Umarov “to activate his fight” and “take a unique chance to win” over Russia.
Yarmosh’s appeal shows “the guts of the so-called new Ukrainian authorities,” according to Aliy Totorkulov, chairman of the Presidium of the Russian Congress of Peoples of the Caucasus.
“Extremists, nationalists of all stripes, flooded the peaceful republic threatening it with chaos and violence,” he said.
He added that the Ukraine’s “Maidan sponsors” and those involved in supporting instability in the Caucasus come from a “single-enter” of extremism.
“We strongly support the deployment of Russian troops to resolve the situation in Crimea as well as provide assistance to other Ukrainian regions where the population rejects nationalism and asks Russia for help and protection,” Totorkulov said
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