Moscow Raises Pressure on West in Ukraine Crisis

MOSCOW; Russia ratcheted up pressure on the West over the Ukraine
crisis on Friday, moving for the first time to endorse the Crimea
region’s secession plan, threatening Ukrainian customers with a gas
shutoff and warning the United States that “hasty and ill-considered
steps” would harm relations.

The developments illustrated how
quickly the crisis has evolved. Just three days earlier, President
Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had said he did not foresee the possibility
of the Crimean Peninsula becoming part of Russia.

But leaders of
both houses of Russia’s Parliament said on Friday that they would
support a vote by Crimeans to break away from Ukraine and become a
region of the Russian Federation. That was a clear signal that the
Kremlin was throwing its full weight behind a secession drive that
Ukraine, the United States and other countries have called
unconstitutional and a violation of international law.

A Russian
soldier and a Navy man guarded the entrance to the Ukrainian Navy's
headquarters at the sea port of Sevastopol, in the Crimea region of
Ukraine.

Michael A. McFaul, the former ambassador to Russia, said government expertise was less robust than it was decades ago.

The
refrendum on the issue that that the Crimean regional government plans
to hold on March 16 — a little more than a week away — has been
denounced by the fledgling national government in Kiev, which said it
would invalidate the outcome and dissolve the Crimean Parliament.
President Obama has also rejected the referendum, and the United States
government announced sanctions on Thursday in response to Russia’s de
facto military occupation of the Crimean Peninsula.

Russia
denounced those sanctions in a blunt rejoinder on Friday evening, posted
on the Foreign Ministry website. The statement said that Russia’s
foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, spoke by telephone with Secretary of
State John Kerry and warned that “hasty and ill-considered steps” to
impose sanctions on Russia officials “would inevitably backfire on the
United States itself.”

The Russians also sent menacing economic
signals to the financially stressed interim central government in Kiev,
which Russia has refused to recognize. Gazprom, the Russian natural gas
monopoly, which supplies Ukraine with most of its gas, warned that it
might shut off supplies unless Ukraine immediately paid $1.89 billion
that it owes the company.

“We cannot deliver gas for free,” Russia news agencies quoted Gazprom’s chief executive Alexei Miller as saying.

Gazprom
cut off gas to Ukraine for nearly two weeks in January 2009, causing
severe economic problems for Ukraine and for European customers
elsewhere who were dependent on supplies delivered through Ukraine.

Valentina
I. Matviyenko, the chairwoman of the upper house of the Russian
Parliament, the Federation Council, compared the planned referendum in
Crimea to one scheduled to be held in Scotland on whether to become
independent from Britain. She did not mention that the national
government in Britain had agreed to hold a referendum, while the
Ukrainian government has not.

The speaker of the Russian lower
house, Sergei Y. Naryshkin, echoed Ms. Matviyenko’s remarks. "We will
respect the historic choice of the people of Crimea,” he said.

The
remarks by the legislative leaders, both close political allies of
President Putin, came a day after Crimea’s regional assembly voted
behind closed doors to secede from Ukraine apply to join the Russian
Federation, and to hold a referendum for voters in the region to ratify
the decision. On Friday, a delegation of lawmakers from Crimea arrived
in Moscow to lay the groundwork for joining Russia, winning strong
endorsements from senior lawmakers.

“We admire your fortitude and
courage,” Ms. Matviyenko told them, according to Interfax news agency.
“Many threats have been made against you; there were threats of attacks,
in particular, against the Black Sea Fleet, but you endured that and
protected your people.”

Continue reading the main story
In
another telling sign of official Russian support, the Crimean delegates
were cheered at a rally in central Moscow that was shown at length on
Russian state television, with songs and chants of “Russia, Moscow,
Crimea.” News agencies quoted the police as saying the rally was
attended by 60,000 people.

Even if the referendum proceeds as
planned and Crimea residents approve of secession from Ukraine, it is
unclear what would happen next.

“Any discussion about the future
of Ukraine must include the legitimate government of Ukraine,” Mr. Obama
said on Thursday at the White House. “In 2014, we are well beyond the
days when borders can be redrawn over the heads of democratic leaders.”

Hours
after the United States announced the first punitive actions against
specific Russians over the crisis, Mr. Obama contacted Mr. Putin. The
two leaders spoke for an hour by telephone and, according to the White
House, Mr. Obama urged Mr. Putin to authorize direct talks with
Ukraine’s new government, permit the entry of international monitors and
return his forces to the bases that Russia leases in Crimea.

Early
Friday, the Kremlin released a statement offering a starkly different
account of the phone call, and emphasizing Russia’s view that the new
government in Kiev is illegitimate.

“In the course of the
discussion there emerged differences in approaches and assessments of
the causes which brought about the current crisis and the resulting
state of affairs,” the statement said. “Vladimir Putin, for his part,
noted that this had occurred as a result of an anti-constitutional coup,
which does not have a national mandate.”

The Kremlin went on to
say that the current Ukrainian leadership had imposed “absolutely
illegitimate decisions” on the eastern and southeastern regions of the
country. “Russia cannot ignore appeals connected to this, calls for
help, and acts appropriately, in accordance with international law,” the
statement said.

Mr. Putin, the statement said, appreciated the
importance of the Russian-American relationship to global security, and
added that bilateral ties “should not be sacrificed for individual —
albeit rather important — international problems.”

In Kiev, the
leader of the Right Sector movement, Dmytro Yarosh, will run for
president of Ukraine, the chairman of the local branch of the movement,
Andriy Tarasenko, said on Friday. The nationalist group, which was
important in the fight for Kiev’s Independence Square in February that
drove Mr. Yanukovych from power, will rename itself at a congress in a
week and participate in elections at all levels, Mr. Tarasenko said.

Right
Sector has been controversial for its semi-military organization, but
it has also refrained from working in eastern Ukraine, where many
Russian speakers live and where its presence could be seen as a
provocation by Russia. But Mr. Tarasenko said that the group was
prepared to fight, in Crimea and elsewhere, “if the Kremlin tramples on
us further.” He added, “Accordingly, we are conducting mobilization and
are preparing to repel foreign aggression.”

Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk,
the interim prime minister of Ukraine, said on Friday that he had
requested a second telephone conversation with the Russian prime
minister, Dmitri A. Medvedev. The two men last spoke on Saturday, which
was the only high-level contact between Moscow and the new authorities
in Kiev.

Ukraine is ready for talks with Russia, Mr. Yatsenyuk
said, but Moscow must first withdraw its troops, abide by international
agreements and halt its support for “separatists and terrorists in
Crimea.” He repeated Ukraine’s position that a referendum in Crimea is
both illegal and unconstitutional. “No one in the civilized world will
recognize the results of a so-called referendum carried out by these
so-called authorities,” Mr. Yatsenyuk said.

With Washington and
Moscow trading angry accusations of hypocrisy on the issue of respecting
state sovereignty, validating Crimea’s secession would carry pointed
political risks for Mr. Putin, given longstanding demands for
independence from Russia by its own similarly autonomous republics in
the Caucasus, including Dagestan and Chechnya.

Continue reading the main story
Michael
A. McFaul, the former American ambassador to Russia, noted the parallel
in a sharp post on Twitter. “If Russian government endorses Crimean
referendum,” Mr. McFaul wrote, using abbreviations needed for a
140-character limit, “will they also allow/endorse similar votes in
republics in the Russian Federation?”

The West, which has
insisted that the Ukrainian people are entitled to decide their future
without interference from Russia, faces similar challenges as it seeks
to explain why the people of Crimea should not necessarily decide their
own fate.

The United States and its European allies typically
support self-determination but have opposed independence for regions in
their own borders, like Scotland from Britain or Catalonia from Spain.

There
was no sign on Friday that Russian armed forces were relaxing their
tight clench on the Crimean peninsula, with military bases surrounded
and border crossings under strict control. For the second consecutive
day, an observer mission from the Organization for Security and
Co-operation in Europe, the 57-member organization that includes both
Ukraine and Russia, was prevented from entering Crimea at a checkpoint
blocked by armed men.

On Thursday, international diplomats raced
from meeting to meeting in an effort to end the standoff. European
leaders signaled they might join American sanctions and Moscow
threatened countermeasures as an already tense situation was made edgier
by the start of new Russian military drills.

European Union
leaders issued a statement in Brussels calling an annexation referendum
“contrary to the Ukrainian Constitution and therefore illegal.”

In
Kiev, the acting president of Ukraine, Oleksandr V. Turchynov, said
Thursday that the national government would invalidate the decision to
hold the referendum and would dissolve the Crimean Parliament. Crimea,
part of Ukraine since 1954, has enjoyed substantial autonomy since
shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the region’s
Constitution generally defers to the national Ukrainian Constitution on
jurisdictional matters.

Mr. Turchynov scoffed at the plan for a
referendum, noting that Russian forces had taken control of Crimea’s
borders and ports and were blocking Ukrainian military bases and
occupying other security installations. “This will be a farce,” he said
in a televised address. “This will be false. This will be a crime
against the state.” He insisted that Ukraine would “protect the sanctity
of our territory.”

Officials in Kiev had already declared the
Crimean Parliament to be acting illegally, and a court issued an arrest
warrant for Sergei Aksyonov, the leader of the breakaway effort, who was
installed as prime minister of Crimea after armed men seized the
Parliament building last week.

Leaders of the peninsula’s large
Crimean Tatar minority also denounced the move. “Today’s decision by the
Parliament is completely illegal,” said Refat Chubarov, the leader of
the main Tatar organization and a member of Parliament. He refused to
take part in the parliamentary voting on Thursday because he said it was
illegitimate.

“More troubling for us is that this decision could
provoke and lead to further escalation of tensions,” Mr. Chubarov said
in an interview. “A referendum under the conditions of the presence of
foreign troops on the streets is called something entirely different in
world practice — it’s a coup. It’s the seizure of territory.”

The
sanctions Mr. Obama approved Thursday imposed visa bans on officials
and other individuals deemed responsible for undermining Ukrainian
sovereignty and territorial integrity. The administration would not
disclose the names or number of people penalized, but a senior official
said privately that it would affect just under a dozen people, mostly
Russians but some of them Ukrainian.

Among those targeted were
political figures, policy advisers, security officials and military
officers who played a direct role in the Crimean crisis, the official
said. Any of them seeking to travel to the United States would be
barred, and a few who currently hold American visas will have them
revoked.

Mr. Obama also signed an executive order laying out a
framework for tougher measures like freezing the assets of individuals
and institutions. But the White House refrained from applying those
measures while officials gathered evidence in the hope that waiting
would provide some space for Russia to reverse course. The House, in the
meantime, approved an economic aid package for the Kiev government and
advanced its own sanctions resolution.

Moscow, however, gave no
indication that it would back down, suggesting that it would reciprocate
with measures seizing American property in Russia. “The U.S. has the
right, and we have the right to respond to it,” Vladimir Lukin, a
Russian envoy who has worked on the Ukrainian crisis, told Interfax, a
Russian news agency. “But all that is, of course, not making me happy.”

The
European Union took a step toward more serious measures by suspending
talks with Moscow on a wide-ranging political-economic pact and on
liberalizing visa requirements to make it easier for Russians to travel
to Europe. European leaders laid out a three-stage process that, absent
progress, would next move to travel bans, asset seizures and the
cancellation of a planned European Union-Russia summit meeting and
eventually to broader economic measures.

Chancellor Angela Merkel
of Germany, who has been reluctant to move quickly toward sanctions,
said the European Union was looking for concrete evidence that Russia
was trying to calm the situation “in the next few days,” but she noted
that Thursday’s events in Crimea made the need for action more urgent.

“We
made it very clear that we are absolutely willing to achieve matters by
negotiation,” she said. “We also say, however, that we are ready and
willing, if these hopes were to be dashed and looking at what happened
on Crimea, to adopt sanctions.”