KIEV, Ukraine - The Group of Seven nations is preparing new measures against Russia, European officials said Friday, and Ukraine’s government said separatists had seized international monitors as hostages in eastern Ukraine.
President Barack Obama discussed deepening sanctions against Russia with the leaders of Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Italy in a conference call a day after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry accused Russia of trying to impose its will in Ukraine at “the barrel of a gun.”
The leaders spoke Friday after Russia renewed military exercises on its neighbor’s border and explosions in two Ukrainian cities wounded eight people.
Russia hasn’t fulfilled its part of an April 17 accord signed in Geneva and aimed at calming the crisis, the U.S. and European officials said. The conflict - the biggest between Russia and its former Cold War enemies since the collapse of the Soviet Union - escalated Friday when Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Ukraine against continuing an anti-separatist offensive that killed five rebels.
“The five leaders agreed that in the light of Russia’s refusal to support the process, an extension of the current targeted sanctions would need to be implemented, in conjunction with other G-7 leaders and with European partners,” U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron’s office said in a statement.
In a joint statement re-leased Friday night by the White House, the G-7 nations said they will act urgently to intensify “targeted sanctions.” The statement said the G-7 also will continue to prepare broader sanctions on key Russian economic sectors if Moscow takes more aggressive action.
The White House said U.S. sanctions could be levied as early as Monday.
Pro-Russian militants captured a bus Friday carrying observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a 57-nation group that includes Russia and the U.S. and focuses on conflict prevention and preserving human rights, Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said in a statement on its website. The separatists were holding 13 people hostage in the eastern Ukrainian city of Slovyansk, it said.
Vyacheslav Ponomaryov, the self-proclaimed pro-Russian “people’s mayor” of Slovyansk, said rebels had stopped the bus because the organization’s observers were accompanied by Ukrainian officers. Activists found weapons and ammunition, news service Interfax cited him as saying.
There also were reports of violence Friday. In southern Ukraine, seven people were wounded by a blast at a checkpoint set up by local authorities and pro-Ukraine activists outside the Black Sea port of Odessa. Police spokesman Volodymyr Shablienko said unknown men had thrown a grenade at the checkpoint.
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said a grenade fired from a launcher caused an explosion that crashed a helicopter at an airfield outside the eastern city of Kramatorsk, wounding a pilot. Ponomaryov took responsibility for the crash.
He said the helicopter flew over the town Friday morning dropping “government propaganda” leaflets. They featured a black-and-white picture of a masked man taking aim with a handgun and read: “Peaceful residents of Kramatorsk and Slovyansk. In your native towns Russian saboteurs and terrorists and local criminals under their leadership are preparing grounds to totally destabilize the situation and destroy peaceful life.”
During the conference call after the explosions, Obama, Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi condemned“the absence of any efforts” by Russia to support the implementation of the Geneva agreement, Cameron’s office said.
EU foreign ministers agreed in principle April 14 to expand a “stage two” blacklist, possibly targeting Russian companies alongside government officials and military officers. So far, the bloc has slapped asset freezes and travel bans on 55 Russians and Ukrainians.
“Stage three” sanctions - sweeping economic measures - are more contentious within the 28-nation group and would need to be decided by its leaders.
John Baird, the foreign minister of G-7 member Canada, said “there is no doubt” sanctions are having an effect on Russia through depreciation in its currency, the ruble, and market instability.
“The message that Russia is sending that they are not having any effect - really that’s a call for us to go further, which we would certainly support,” Baird said.
RUSSIAN JETS FLY OVER
At the United Nations on Friday, Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister, Danylo Lubkivsky, said he feared an imminent Russian invasion.
“We have the information we are in danger,” Lubkivsky said, adding that Russian military maneuvers involving air and ground forces along the Ukraine border were a “very dangerous development.”
“We are going to protect our motherland against any invasion,” Lubkivsky said. “We call on the Russians to stop this madness.”
The heightened rhetoric came as U.S. officials reported that Russian fighter jets flew into Ukrainian airspace several times over 24 hours.It wasn’t clear what the intent was, but the aircraft could have been testing Ukrainian radar or making a show of force, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly about the issue.
Russia also increased its military exercises along the Ukraine border, including moving a broad array of fixed-wing and rotary aircraft, infantry and armored troops - further inflaming fears of a potential Russian military incursion into Ukraine.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk on Friday accused Russia of seeking to disrupt a May 25 presidential election, remove the pro-European government in Kiev and seize territory.
“Russian military aggression on Ukrainian territory will lead to a military conflict all across Europe,” he said at a Cabinet meeting in Kiev. “The world has not yet forgotten World War II, while Russia wants to start World War III.”
Meanwhile, leaders at a meeting of the Eastern Partnership initiative attended by ex-Soviet republics Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia in Prague “recommended” Russia withdraw what NATO officials estimate are as many as 40,000 troops from Ukraine’s border.
“We are facing the most serious crisis since 1945,” Stefan Fule, EU enlargement commissioner, said at the meeting. “Ukraine, its citizens and their freedoms cannot become victims of political games.”
Russia has more than tripled the number of helicopters at a base close to the Latvian border to about 100, Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics said Friday. NATO has responded by providing a reassurance package for the region, signaling the Baltic states are part of military alliance.
Kerry said Thursday that Russia was engaging in a “full-throated effort” to sabotage Ukraine’s democratic process through “gross external intimidation” in which military and intelligence operatives were providing personnel, weapons, money and planning to destabilize its neighbor.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said it was adhering to the Geneva accord and called for a halt to military operations in Ukraine.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov declared that pro-Russia insurgents in the country’s east would disarm and leave the territory they have occupied only if the Ukrainian government clears out a protest camp in Kiev’s Independence Square, known as the Maidan, and evicts activists from other occupied facilities.
“The West wants - and this is how it all began - to seize control of Ukraine because of their own political ambitions, not in the interests of the Ukrainian people,” Lavrov said.
Pro-Russia insurgents will disarm and vacate buildings “only if Kiev authorities get down to implementing the Geneva accords, clear out that shameful Maidan and liberate the buildings that have been illegally seized,” the Russian foreign minister said.
Yulia Torhovets, a spokesman for the Kiev city government, said activists have promised to leave Kiev’s occupied City Hall by the end of the week.
The Maidan tent camp and occupation of government buildings in the capital are rooted in the months-long protests that culminated in pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych fleeing the country for Russia in February. The hundreds of demonstrators and activists who remain say they want to pressure the new government to enact promised changes and to protect the buildings from attack by pro-Russia forces.
The occupiers in Kiev consist largely of nationalist sympathizers, including the far-right group Right Sector, who were a core element of the anti-Yanukovych protests.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s defense minister, Mykhaylo Koval, described the offensive against separatists in the eastern city of Slovyansk, where the five rebels died Thursday, as “a surgical operation,” saying the security forces are aiming to “liquidate separatists and protect the lives of peaceful citizens at the same time.”
Acting Ukrainian President Oleksandr Turchynov’s chief of staff, Serhiy Pashynsky, said troops had blockaded Slovyansk to prevent the arrival of rebel reinforcements, according to a statement on the presidential website.
One member of the government forces has died and nine have been wounded since the operation started last week, said Vasyl Krutov, the official in charge of Ukraine’s anti-terrorist center.
WARNING FROM GEORGIA
In Prague on Friday, the president of Georgia, a country carved up by Russian troops in 2008, warned Western countries against alienating Russia over the Ukraine crisis.
Giorgi Margvelashvili said that could have consequences for the rest of Europe.
“I don’t think it’s a right choice to alienate Russia, to cut relations with Russia,” Margvelashvili said. “Because alienating Russia makes Russia even more aggressive, unpredictable and dangerous.”
He said diplomats should instead make it clear to Russia “that relations between neighbors or countries around the world aren’t built through military interventions.”
Georgia plans to sign a political association agreement with the EU in June to boost ties and get a free-trade deal and visa-free travel. Moldova is another post-Soviet republic planning to sign a similar agreement.
Ukraine signed such an agreement on the same day last month that Putin signed parliamentary legislation annexing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
Russian forces crushed the Georgian army in a brief 2008 war over Georgia’s breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The two regions then immediately claimed independence but have been recognized only by Russia and a few of its allies.
Margvelashvili said it was important to convince Russia that “this is not an anti-Russian track.” He said his country was not afraid of retaliation by Russia for the EU move but added: “We are cautious.”
“This is a sovereign decision of our nation and I don’t think that anyone has the right to punish either Georgia, or Moldova or Ukraine, for taking sovereign decisions in the 21st century,” Margvelashvili said earlier Friday.
Information for this article was contributed by Daryna Krasnolutska, Patrick Donahue, Margaret Talev, Daria Marchak, Volodymyr Verbyany, Anna Andrianova, Jason Corcoran, Irina Reznik, Ksenia Galouchko, Henry Meyer, Dakin Campbell, Jones Hayden, Phil Mattingly, Joi Preciphs, Terry Atlas, Indira A.R. Lakshmanan, Kasia Klimasinska, Ian Katz, Peter Laca and Rainer Buergin of Bloomberg News; by Peter Leonard, Maria Danilova, Laura Mills, Nataliya Vasilyeva,Yuras Karmanau, Julie Pace, Karel Janicek and Lolita C. Baldor of The Associated Press; and by Sergei L. Loiko of the Los Angeles Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 04/26/2014