Hindustan Surkhiyan Desk: ♦ Trump expresses ‘deep concern’
♦ Merkel warns ‘no military solution’ to conflict
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko yesterday accused Russia’s Vladimir Putin of wanting to annex his entire country and called for Nato to deploy warships to a sea shared by the two nations.
Poroshenko’s comments to German media were part of a concerted push by Kiev aimed at gaining Western support for more sanctions against Moscow, securing tangible Western military help, and rallying opposition to a Russian gas pipeline that threatens to deprive Ukraine of important transit revenue.
His Western allies have so far not offered to give him any of these things soon, despite his warnings of a possible invasion by Russia after Moscow seized three Ukrainian naval ships and their crews on Sunday.
Moscow and Kiev blame each other for the Black Sea incident, which took place off Russian-annexed Crimea.
Putin has insisted that Russian forces were in the right to seize the ships, but President Donald Trump expressed “deep concern” at Moscow’s actions against a US ally.
“Don’t believe Putin’s lies,” Poroshenko told Bild, Germany’s biggest-selling paper, comparing Russia’s protestations of innocence in the affair to Moscow’s 2014 denial that it had soldiers in Crimea even as they moved to annex it.
“Putin wants the old Russian empire back,” he said. “Crimea, Donbass, the whole country. As Russian Tsar, as he sees himself, his empire can not function without Ukraine. He sees us as his colony.”
After warning of the threat of “full-scale war”, Poroshenko on Wednesday signed an act imposing martial law for 30 days in regions bordering Russia, the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.
Poroshenko told Bild he also wanted Nato to deploy warships to the Sea of Azov. The Kremlin said Poroshenko’s request looked designed to cause more tensions in the area.
Meanwhile, European leaders rebuffed the calls from Ukraine for greater support against Russia yesterday.
While blaming Russia for tensions, German Chancellor Angela Merkel showed no signs of being ready to back military support.
“We ask the Ukrainian side too to be sensible because we know that we can only solve things through being reasonable and through dialogue because there is no military solution to these disputes,” she said.
Russia on Thursday deployed a new battalion of advanced S-400 surface-to-air missile systems in Crimea, its fourth such.
US and the EU have both imposed sanctions on Russia over its conduct towards Ukraine since 2014, when Moscow seized and annexed Crimea after a pro-Russian leader was toppled in Kiev. Moscow later backed pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine in a conflict in which more than 10,000 people have been killed. Major fighting ended with a 2015 ceasefire but deadly exchanges of fire are still frequent.
