COUP IN KYIV?

The Crimean parliament voted to join Russia Thursday, dramatically escalating tensions in Ukraine as Russian forces tightened their grip on the ground.


Deepening the worst East-West crisis since the Cold War, MPs in the majority ethnic-Russian peninsula agreed to put the question of secession from Ukraine to a referendum on March 16.


The motion, passed by 78 out of 86 MPs, was immediately condemned by Ukrainian authorities and Western powers as illegitimate and in breach of Ukraine’s constitution. Washington responded quickly, mobilising its military assets in the region and placing visa bans on Ukrainian and Russian officials it deemed responsible for destabilising Crimea.


The European Union then took bigger steps than expected towards sanctions against Russia. It committed to a “three-step approach”, beginning with the immediate suspension of trade and visa liberalisation talks with Russia and a boycott of a G8 summit due to be held in Sochi in June.


Unless Russia agrees to talk to Ukraine via a contact group of mediators, including the US, Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Poland, or to allow international observers into the Crimea over the next week, the EU will follow the US by hitting Russian officials with sanctions. “Such negotiations need to start within the next few days and produce results within a limited time frame,” said the summit statement. “In the absence of such results the EU will decide on additional measures, such as travel bans, asset freezes. The commission will take forward preparatory work on these measures.”





In a substantial scaling up of the pressure on Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, the EU has threatened an economic blockade if he breaks up Ukraine by supporting Crimea’s bid to join Russia. “Any further steps by the Russian Federation to destabilise the situation in Ukraine would lead to severe and far-reaching consequences for relations between the EU and the Russian Federation which will include a broad range of economic areas,” a statement read.

David Cameron joined Lithuania and Poland by comparing Russia’s actions to the rise of Nazi Germany in the Thirties and warned of the dangers of appeasing countries that invaded other European nations. “We are at a dangerous moment. The territorial integrity of an independent nation has been violated,” he said. “What has happened with respect to the Crimea is unacceptable and there can be no business as usual with Russia.

“Russia has acted in flagrant breach of international law. This matters to the people of Britain because we depend on a world where countries obey the rules; and this matters because this is happening in our own neighbourhood on the European continent where for the last 70 years we have worked so hard to keep the peace.”

Wider diplomatic efforts to defuse the crisis stalled, with a second round of talks in two days between John Kerry, the US Secretary of State and Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister ending without agreement.

Thursday, gunmen at an improvised checkpoint on Crimea’s regional border with the rest of Ukraine blocked a group of 40 unarmed military observers from carrying out an inspection mission requested by Ukraine’s government.

A spokesman for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe said they were “prevented from entering Crimean territory”. A Western diplomatic source said that the gunmen, who did not identify themselves, were “very professional – this was not some militia”.

According to local journalists in Crimea and news reports, regional authorities in the administrative center Simferopol stopped transmitting the two privately owned broadcasters' analogue signals to the peninsula today on the order of Sergei Aksenov, the recently appointed pro-Russian prime minister of the region. Earlier this week his government threatened in a statement to "shut off the flow of deceitful and biased information in order to save the public from negative impact," the independent news website Lenta reported.