Geneva Deal on Ukraine Crisis Faltering
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April 21, 2014
U.S. and European officials say they will hold Moscow responsible and impose new economic sanctions if the separatists do not clear out of government buildings they have occupied across swaths of eastern Ukraine over the past two weeks.
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Kyiv, where he is expected to meet with Ukrainian officials as a show of support.
“He will call for urgent implementation of the agreement reached in Geneva last week while also making clear ... that there will be mounting costs for Russia if they choose a destabilizing rather than constructive course in the days ahead,” a senior administration official told reporters.
Russia, Ukraine, the European Union and the United States signed off on the agreement in Geneva on Thursday designed to lower tensions in the worst confrontation between Russia and the West since the Cold War. The agreement calls for buildings occupied by separatists to be vacated under the auspices of envoys from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
But no sooner had the accord been signed than both sides accused the other of breaking it, while the pro-Moscow rebels disavowed the pledge to withdraw from occupied buildings.
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden waves after landing at Boryspil International Airport in Kyiv April 21, 2014.Biden's talks with Ukrainian officials will also focus on the situation in eastern Ukraine where an Easter Sunday truce barely lasted a few hours before it was shattered by a gunfight at a checkpoint near the city of Slovyansk, controlled by pro-Russia separatists. According to some accounts, three people were killed although the circumstances remain unclear.
Ukraine blames the attack on Russian special forces, which Kyiv says have infiltrated the eastern part of the country in an effort to destabilize it.
Moscow blames Kyiv
Commenting on the Slovyansk incident, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the Ukrainian government of not wanting to control extremists who he says are shooting unarmed civilians.
Lavrov said Monday Ukraine is "crudely" violating last week's Geneva agreement which called on all armed illegal groups in the east to disarm and leave. The agreement also called for a mission by European monitors.
In response, Ukraine’s foreign minister expressed surprise over “Lavrov not being aware of what is happening in Ukraine with regard to the Geneva agreement.”
“We are meeting daily in a quadripartite format, together with the OSCE mission leadership, developing ways of de-escalating the situation in Ukraine’s east,” said Andriy Deshchytsia, according to Ukrainian news agency UNIAN.
He also said he is surprised that Russian diplomats present at these meetings apparently are not reporting back to their Foreign Ministry.
Despite apparent efforts to diffuse the tensions, pro-Russian demonstrators who have taken over government buildings in about a dozen eastern Ukrainian cities and towns have so far showed no sign of backing down.
In a stab at Washington, Lavrov said the United States must recognize its share of the responsibility for the crisis in Ukraine because of its support of the new Ukrainian government.
He said attempts to isolate Russia thorough sanctions will fail, saying the majority of the world does not want to isolate Russia.
The pro-Russia activists in eastern Ukraine, many of whom Kyiv says are not locals, are demanding the right to hold referendums on seceeding from Ukraine and joining Russia. One such controversial vote in Crimea last month led to Moscow's annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula.
Pentagon boost Europe training
Meanwhile, Pentagon officials are saying that details are being worked out for more training with Eastern and Central Europe allies.
Some of the training exercises would be via NATO, others conducted on a bilateral basis, Pentagon officials said at a briefing, adding that all options would "include some level of ground force."
Officials also said that the U.S.is not seeing any substantial troop movements by Russians forces away from Ukraine's border.
Putin decree
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on Monday to rehabilitate Crimea's Tatars and other minorities who suffered under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, courting a group that largely opposed Moscow's annexation of the region from Ukraine.
Stalin deported Crimean Tatars to Central Asia en masse during World War Two, accusing them of sympathizing with Nazi Germany, and many died in grueling conditions on arrival in exile.
The Muslim Tatars were allowed to return in the waning days of the Soviet Union, whose 1991 collapse left Crimea in an independent Ukraine. They now make up 12 percent of the Crimea peninsula's mostly ethnic Russian population of 2 million.
Many of them boycotted the March 16 referendum in Crimea, which Russia used as a pretext to annex the peninsula, sparking the biggest crisis in relations between Russia and the West since the Cold War.
OSCE mediator meets separatist leader
The senior mediator from the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe in eastern Ukraine held his first talks on Monday with the leader of pro-Russian separatists in the city of Slovyansk, a flashpoint of the crisis.
Mark Etherington told reporters he met the self-declared, separatist mayor, Vyacheslav Ponomaryov, for two hours. He had asked whether Ponomaryov and his group would comply with last week's Geneva accord under which Russia and Ukraine agreed that militants should disarm and vacate occupied public buildings.
Etherington did not say how the separatist leader responded or give further details. He said he also asked about people who had been detained in Slovyansk, including the previous mayor, about reports of maltreatment of the Roma minority and about a gunfight on Sunday in which at least three men were killed.
VOA's Jeff Seldin contributed to this story; some reporting by Reuters
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