Biden Visits Ukraine as Nation Marks Protest Anniversary
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden is in
Kyiv for talks with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko as NATO
presses Russia to pull back its troops from inside eastern
Ukraine.
Biden’s visit comes as Ukrainians mark a new national
holiday today, the Day of Dignity and Freedom, on the first
anniversary of the start of the “Euromaidan” protests that
ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych in February. Deadly
exchanges of fire between troops and pro-Russian separatists in
eastern Ukraine underlined the continuing crisis in the country.
“We call on Russia to stop fueling the conflict,” North
Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg
said yesterday as he urged Russian President Vladimir Putin’s
government to “use all its influence” to make sure the
separatists respect a Sept. 5 cease-fire that has been broken
almost daily.
The Ukrainian crisis has intensified since rebels in the
breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk held Nov. 2 elections
that the government in Kyiv condemned as illegitimate. Ukraine,
the European Union and the U.S. accuse Putin of supporting the
separatists. Russia denies involvement.
One Ukrainian soldier was killed and 18 wounded in clashes
during the past 24 hours, the National Security and Defense
Council in Kyiv said in a statement on Facebook. Separatists
attacked Ukrainian positions 39 times and the military fired 18
times to repel rebel attacks, it said.
Jeers, Tears
Biden didn’t join Poroshenko and other political leaders at
a memorial ceremony today to more than 100 people killed in
clashes with security forces in February near Kyiv’s
Independence Square, known as Maidan. A group of people heckled
the president, shouting “shame on you,” and said they were
relatives of the dead who wanted them recognized as national
heroes.
Poroshenko left the ceremony then returned a short time
later promising to “sign a decree tonight that those people are
heroes of Ukraine,” prompting applause and tears among the
crowd.
Poroshenko’s political party said earlier that it had
reached a coalition agreement with four other parties following
the Oct. 26 parliamentary elections. The Poroshenko Bloc, Prime
Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front, the Samopomich
Party, the Radical Party, and Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna
party signed the draft agreement today, according to a statement
on the Poroshenko Bloc’s website.
Violating Sovereignty
NATO rejected a Russian demand that Ukraine guarantee it
won’t join the military alliance as a violation of the country’s
sovereignty, Stoltenberg said during a visit to Tallinn,
Estonia, yesterday. He urged Russia to withdraw its forces from
eastern Ukraine and from the border area.
Russia accused the U.S. of instigating the violence. “The
U.S. was one of the initiators of the conflict in Ukraine, and
if they supply weapons there, the conflict will grow,” State
Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev told reporters in
Moscow yesterday.
The United Nations linked Russian fighters to human-rights
violations in a report yesterday that cited a “total breakdown
of law and order” in eastern Ukraine. It raised its estimate of
the death toll there to least 4,317 people, with 9,921 wounded
and 466,829 displaced.
“The continuing presence of a large amount of
sophisticated weaponry, as well as foreign fighters that include
servicemen from the Russian Federation, directly affects the
human rights situation in the east of Ukraine,” according to
the UN report posted on the website of human rights chief Zeid
Ra’ad Al Hussein. “Civilians have continued to be killed,
unlawfully detained, tortured and disappeared.”
‘Terrorist Country’
The conflict has unnerved countries in Europe’s former
communist east, with Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite
saying that Putin is pushing Russia to be “aggressive, to
occupy other regions and to drastically reorganize international
security in the world, and especially in Europe.”
“We’re facing a situation in which some of our neighbors
are becoming a terrorist country,” she said yesterday.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov yesterday faulted a
“reckless, nonstop expansion of NATO” after the collapse of
the Soviet Union as undermining European security and
contributing to the conflict in Ukraine.
At the Pentagon, U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel blamed
Putin, saying the Russian leader “just doesn’t accept a world
order as it is.”
“He’s challenging a world order that has been pretty
important the last few years as we’ve come through some
significant events, beginning with the implosion of the Soviet
Union,” Hagel said in an excerpt from an interview for the
“Charlie Rose” show on PBS, which is rebroadcast on Bloomberg
Television. “And I think he’s going to continue to challenge us
in the West in a lot of areas.”
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To contact the reporters on this story:
Ott Ummelas in Tallinn at
oummelas@bloomberg.net;
Kateryna Choursina in Kyiv at
kchoursina@bloomberg.net;
Daryna Krasnolutska in Kyiv at
dkrasnolutsk@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story:
James M. Gomez at
jagomez@bloomberg.net
Tony Halpin, Scott Rose