Ukraine will ‘not fight Russia’ over Crimea
KYIV — Ukraine’s acting president said he would not wage war over Crimea as the former Soviet state’s premier prepared on Wednesday to seek US President Barack Obama’s help against Russia’s expansionist threat.
The first meeting between Mr Obama and Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk comes with the East European nation in danger of breaking apart when the predominantly ethnic Russian region holds a Moscow-backed referendum on Sunday on switching over to Kremlin rule.
Ukraine’s acting President Oleksandr Turchynov said his heavily outnumbered army would never try to seize back the Black Sea peninsula from Russian troops who made their land grab days after the February 22 removal in Kyiv of pro-Kremlin leader Viktor Yanukovych.
“We cannot launch a military operation in Crimea, as we would expose the eastern border and Ukraine would not be protected,” he said.
Mr Turchynov also said Russian President Vladimir Putin has so far resisted intense international pressure and refused all contacts with Kyiv aimed at resolving the worst breakdown in East-West relations since the Cold War.
“Unfortunately, for now Russia is rejecting a diplomatic solution to the conflict,” he said. “They are refusing all contact at foreign ministry and top government level.”
Russia’s first military involvement in a neighbouring country since its brief 2008 war with Georgia has sparked an explosive security crisis and exposed major rifts between western allies over ways to deal with Mr Putin’s undisguised efforts to rebuild vestiges of the Soviet Union.
Washington has imposed travel bans and asset freezes on Russians held responsible for violating the territorial integrity of the culturally splintered nation of 46-million people.
But the European Union — its financial and energy sectors much more dependent on Russia than those of the US — has only threatened tougher measures after taking the lighter step of suspending free travel and broad economic treaty talks.
The standoff has also seen US Secretary of State John Kerry deliver a snub of immense diplomatic proportions by refusing a visit to Moscow that could have included a meeting with the Kremlin chief.
But the show of western displeasure has not kept Mr Putin from effectively taking Crimea and threatening to use force to “protect” the interests of ethnic Russians living in the east of Ukraine.
The international community’s almost unanimous rejection of the referendum’s legitimacy has done little to slow Russia’s attempt to redraw Europe’s postwar borders by absorbing a region that was handed to Ukraine as a “gift” when it was still a Soviet republic in 1954.
Russia’s parliament is due on March 21 to consider legislation that would simplify the procedure under which Moscow can annex part of another country that has proclaimed independence — as Crimean legislators did on Tuesday.
Ukraine’s soldiers and marines have won plaudits from western leaders for refusing to open fire against Russian troops and Kremlin-backed militia who have encircled their bases and kept their ships from going out to sea.
Mr Turchynov said that as commander-in-chief he fully realised the futility of launching an all-out war against a much larger invading force that has nuclear weapons.
“Significant tank units are massed near Ukraine’s eastern border,” the acting president said. “They’re provoking us to have a pretext to intervene on the Ukrainian mainland … (but) we cannot follow the scenario written by the Kremlin.”
Russia regards the present Kyiv regime as unlawful and as having come to power by a coup.
AFP