Dozens of volunteers restore in Kiev some shredded documents found in the residence of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich. They are hard at work on the frontlines of journalism — piecing together an ousted president’s web of corruption.
MOSCOW: Russia said yesterday it will unveil its own solution to the Ukrainian crisis that runs counter to US efforts and appears to leave room for Crimea to switch over to
Kremlin rule.
The unexpected announcement came as Ukraine’s new pro-European leaders raced against the clock to rally Western support in the face of the seizure by Kremlin-backed forces of the strategic Black Sea peninsula and plans to hold a referendum on Sunday to switch its allegiance from Kiev to Moscow.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threat to invade Ukraine after last month’s ouster of a pro-Kremlin regime by pro-EU leaders has set off the most explosive crisis in East-West relations since the Cold War.
US President Barack Obama and his European allies are urging Russia to call its Crimean troops back to their barracks and launch immediate negotiations with a Ukrainian leadership that Putin claims rose to power thanks to an “unconstitutional coup”.
But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Putin yesterday that proposals he had received from US Secretary of State John Kerry on resolving the stand-off “do not suit us very much”.
Lavrov said documents he had received from Kerry on Friday were “framed as if there exists a conflict between Russia and Ukraine.”
He added that Washington was basing its solution on a recognition of Kiev’s new leaders while Russia still considered the ousted Viktor Yanukovich as the legitimate president of Ukraine.
“Our partners proposed moving forward on the basis of a situation born out of a state coup,” Lavrov told Putin.
But Lavrov gave no indication about when or where Russia’s proposals would be made public. He added that Kerry had delayed a visit to Moscow he planned for yesterday to finalise the details of Washington’s crisis plan.
Putin added new urgency to the stand-off on Sunday by telling German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron that he fully backed the actions being taken by the self-declared rulers of Crimea — in power since an end-of-February seizure of the government by pro-Kremlin gunmen. The Kremlin said Putin stressed “the steps undertaken by the legitimate authorities of Crimea are based on the norms of international law” — a comment strongly hinting that Moscow was ready to annex Crimea after handing the peninsula to Ukraine as a “gift” when it was a part of the Soviet empire in 1954.
Merkel — whose cautious approach to imposing sanctions on Moscow has clashed with the more hawkish positions of eastern European nations and the United States — bluntly responded that the Crimean referendum was “illegal,” the German chancellor’s office said.
US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt also told reporters in Kiev yesterday that Washington “is not prepared to recognise any result of the so-called referendum.”
The diplomatic wrangling in the face of a threat of all-out war breaking out on the eastern edge of Europe continued as Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk prepared to fly to the United States to meet Obama and address the UN Security Council.
His first meeting with the US leader tomorrow should add credibility to Yatsenyuk’s untested government and provide Ukraine with a chance to iron out the details of crucial economic relief for its wheezing economy.
“This is a very important visit,” Ukraine’s interim Foreign Minister Andriy Deshchytsya told Kiev’s 1+1 television late on Sunday.
The White House said Obama will discuss an economic support package that has already seen Washington pledge a quick infusion of more than $1bn and the European Union promise to issue ¤11bn ($15bn) over two years.
Kiev says it needs about ¤25bn in assistance through 2015 to keep the country running after Russia froze a $15bn package it promised Yanukovych as his reward for rejecting an historic EU trade deal in November.
Ukrainian Finance Minister Oleksandr Shlapak said yesterday he hoped to finalise the details of a deal with the International Monetary Fund under which US and EU aid would be disbursed by April.
Yanukovich’s shock decision to reject the EU pact sparked the Kiev protests in which 100 died — most of them in two days of carnage preceding the pro-Moscow regime’s fall.
Deshchytsya said on Sunday that Kiev hoped to sign parts of the rejected Association Agreement at either a meeting of EU foreign ministers on March 17 or a summit of the bloc’s 28 leaders on March 20-21.
AFP
