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Obama Unveils $1 Billion Security Plan For Eastern Europe

Obama Unveils $1 Billion Security Plan For Eastern Europe

Warsaw (AFP) – President Barack Obama on Tuesday unveiled a $1 billion U.S. security plan for eastern Europe aimed at allaying fears over a resurgent Kremlin and the escalating pro-Russian uprising in ex-Soviet Ukraine.

Obama launched a major tour of Europe in Warsaw where he will attend celebrations of the 25th anniversary of Poland’s first free elections that put both the country and the rest of eastern Europe on a path out of Moscow’s orbit and toward democracy and economic prosperity.

But the poignant ceremony has been haunted by those very countries’ fears of the Kremlin reasserting its Cold War-era grip over a large swathe of Europe following its seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in March.

“Our commitment to Poland’s security as well as the security of our allies in central and eastern Europe is a cornerstone of our own security and it is sacrosanct,” Obama said after inspecting a joint unit of U.S. and Polish F-16 pilots.

Obama proposed an initiative of up to $1 billion to finance extra U.S. troop and military deployments to “new allies” in eastern Europe.

The “European Reassurance Initiative” — a historic plan that must be approved by Congress — would also build the capacity of non-NATO states such as Ukraine and Georgia to work with the United States and the Western alliance and build their own defenses.

Obama’s first pivotal encounter will come Wednesday when he meets Ukraine’s embattled president-elect Petro Poroshenko, with his country threatened by civil war and its new pro-Western leadership grasping for protection from Washington.

The seven-week pro-Russian insurgency in Ukraine’s eastern rust belt grew only more violent after Poroshenko swept to power in a May 25 presidential ballot on a promise to quickly end fighting and save the nation of 46 million from economic collapse.

Hundreds of separatist gunmen staged one of their biggest offensives to date on Monday by attacking a Ukrainian border guard service camp in the region of Lugansk on the border with Russia.

Ukraine’s military reported suffering no fatalities and killing five rebels in a day-long battle that saw insurgents pelt the camp with mortar fire and deploy snipers on rooftops surrounding the base.

But Lugansk’s self-declared “prime minister” Vasyl Nikitin told AFP that at least three civilians and the separatist administration’s top health official had died in the violence.

A spokesman for Ukraine’s “anti-terrorist operation” in the east said one federal soldier was killed and another 13 wounded Tuesday in a new bout of fighting in the neighboring coal mining province of Donetsk.

Washington’s commitment to Ukraine will be reinforced when U.S. Vice President Joe Biden travels to Kiev on Saturday to attend Poroshenko’s swearing in as the country’s fifth post-Soviet president.

The visit is meant to underscore the U.S. position that the people of Ukraine — and not Moscow — should decide their destiny and overcome the cultural differences now tearing apart the vast country’s Russified east and more nationalist west.

Kiev has not yet invited any Moscow official to the inauguration and Russian President Vladimir Putin is yet to formally recognize the result of an election that saw rebels disrupt voting across swathes of the east.

Ukraine and its eastern European allies such as Poland have been pushing Washington and EU leaders to unleash painful economic sanctions against entire sectors of Russia’s economy for the Kremlin’s perceived support of the rebels.

Obama addressed those calls directly by telling a joint press conference with his Polish counterpart Bronislaw Komorowski that Russia faced further punitive measures unless it put more pressure on Ukrainian rebels to halt their insurgency.

“Further Russian provocation will be met with further costs for Russia including, if necessary, additional sanctions,” Obama said.

The U.S. president’s tour also takes in the Group of Seven summit in Brussels on Thursday that symbolically replaces a Group of Eight meeting that Putin was due to host in Sochi but which world leaders decided to boycott.

But the most sensitive part of Obama’s swing will come on Friday when he attends the 70th anniversary commemoration of D-Day in Normandy to which Putin was invited as well.

The U.S. leader has spent months trying to isolate his rival and punish the Kremlin inner circle with sanctions over Ukraine.

Both the Kremlin and White House say no one-on-one meeting between Obama and Putin is being planned.

But senior White House aides have not ruled out an informal encounter — which would be the first for the rivals since Ukraine mushroomed into Europe’s worst security crisis in decades.

Obama also called on Putin to accept Poroshenko’s invitation to hold in Normandy his first talks with a Ukrainian leader since the February ouster of Kremlin-backed president Viktor Yanukovych set Kiev on its new westward course.

Ukraine’s Poroshenko — a 48-year-old chocolate baron who once enjoyed good working relations with Moscow while serving as foreign minister — won a surprise reprieve on Monday when Russia’s state gas firm Gazprom delayed a threatened cut in fuel shipments that would also impact large portions of Europe.

Kiev now has until June 9 to start covering its debts — a period that Russia has promised to use to help reach a long-term price compromise.

But Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk warned on Tuesday that a cut in Russian gas “remains a possibility”.

Photo: Saul Loeb via AFP

Pro-Russia Rebels Shoot Down Ukrainian Helicopter, Killing 12

Pro-Russia Rebels Shoot Down Ukrainian Helicopter, Killing 12

By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times

KIEV, Ukraine — Rebels in the embattled eastern Ukrainian town of Slovyansk shot down a military helicopter on Thursday, killing at least a dozen Ukrainian soldiers, as heavy fighting continued in the area that has been the epicenter of the pro-Russia insurgency for more than two months.

The government troops killed in the crash of the transport helicopter included a general, Volodymyr Kulchitsky, acting President Oleksandr Turchynov told lawmakers in Kiev in a televised announcement.

Turchynov put the death toll at 14, but a later report from the Defense Ministry said 12 were killed and that at least one surviving soldier was in critical condition.

The Ukrainian armed forces have lost scores of soldiers and airmen in recent weeks in the largely unsuccessful operation to regain control of a dozen towns and cities in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions seized by pro-Russian separatists trying to annex to neighboring Russia. The Ukrainian government did manage during heavy fighting on Monday to thwart a separatist takeover of Donetsk’s international airport, Ukraine’s second-largest and a key transport hub for the eastern region.

Also in Slovyansk, the self-proclaimed “mayor,” Vyacheslav Ponomaryov, confirmed that his gunmen were holding four international security monitors missing from their mission in eastern Ukraine for four days. The monitors of the Organization for Security and Cooperating in Europe were detained Monday for disregarding separatist leaders’ orders that they cease traveling around the besieged area, Ponomaryov told the Interfax news agency in the embattled town.

“We had told them not to travel anywhere for a time but these four turned out to be very keen,” Ponomaryov said, intimating that the monitors — a Swiss, a Dane, an Estonian and a Turk — were engaged in espionage.

“Now we will work out who they are, where they were going and why, and we will let them go,” Ponomaryov told the Russian news agency.

The detention of the four OSCE monitors by Ponomaryov’s gunmen was the second seizure of the mission’s members in the last month. A group of seven OSCE observers was held captive for a week in early May by the rebels who contend they aren’t obliged to cooperate with the mission sanctioned by Russia, Ukraine and the rest of the security alliance’s 57 member states.

OSCE headquarters in Vienna lost contact Monday evening with the four monitors operating in the Donetsk area. The Swiss president who chairs the OSCE, Didier Burkhalter, denounced the detention of the monitors as “sabotage.”

Veteran German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger, who heads a separate OSCE mission in Ukraine, warned that the continued assaults on the monitors’ security could force the unarmed representatives to abandon their work of recording incidents of human rights violations and rogue military operations.

“If the security situation is such that one must fear for the lives of our employees, then I fear that we really would have to withdraw,” Ischinger told Germany’s ZDF television.

That would give the pro-Russia rebels greater latitude to seize more territory and would be a move opposed by Ukraine, which remains in an uncertain political position until the newly elected president, billionaire candy maker Petro Poroshenko, is inaugurated on June 15.

Turchynov was named interim president by the Ukrainian parliament in late February after the elected head of state, Viktor Yanukovich, fled Kiev after being forced from office by a three-month rebellion.

Russia has refused to acknowledge the authority of the interim leaders, claiming they seized power in a coup d’etat. The Kremlin has also cast Turchynov and the other former opposition lawmakers running the transitional government as neo-fascists aiming to repress the Russian-speaking communities in eastern Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin used the claim to justify his troops’ seizure of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and to excuse the pro-Russian separatists’ declarations of independence from rule by Kiev.

AFP Photo/Genya Savilov

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As Separatists Press Attacks, Putin Vows To Respect Ukraine Vote

As Separatists Press Attacks, Putin Vows To Respect Ukraine Vote

By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times

KIEV, Ukraine — Russian President Vladimir Putin asserted Friday that he is ready to deal with whoever wins Ukraine’s presidential election. But his latest vow to facilitate a return of elected leadership in Kiev coincided with new attacks and incursions by pro-Russia gunmen, Ukraine’s Security Service chief reported.

Putin, who earlier denounced the Ukrainian government’s plans for a presidential election on Sunday as illegal and the result of a Western-backed coup, told a gathering of international business leaders in St. Petersburg that he doubted the vote would meet international standards “but let them hold it like that, at least,” he said in apparent acceptance.

Hundreds of foreign election observers have flooded into Ukraine in recent days to take part in international monitoring of the vote, which Kiev’s interim leaders say they have sought in order to confirm that the election is free and fair, at least in those parts of the country under control of the central government.

Militants who Ukrainian and Western leaders accuse of trying to destabilize Ukraine and seize more territory for Russia in the eastern and southern regions of the country occupy government buildings, police stations and broadcast facilities in at least a dozen towns and cities in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Ukrainian Interior Ministry officials told reporters in Kiev on Friday that 55,000 police and security forces would be standing guard to protect voters and observers, and that thousands of citizen volunteers had also pledged to be on hand for Sunday’s vote in order to thwart any interference by the militants who have threatened election organizers and vowed to prevent balloting in the volatile areas they say they control.

Putin had been seen as encouraging the militants with his accusations that Kiev’s interim leaders are fascists intent on repressing the Russian minority in the east and south of the country. That was the Kremlin leader’s refrain when he sent Russian troops into Ukraine’s Crimea territory in late February and proclaimed its reunion with Russia on March 18, two days after a dubious referendum held under military occupation reportedly found 97 percent of the peninsula residents in favor of Russian annexation.

The United States and the European Union have imposed targeted sanctions on a few dozen Russian officials and businessmen considered complicit in the seizure of Crimea, which has been condemned by the United Nations and unrecognized by any country.

Putin’s toned-down rhetoric about Ukraine’s election in recent weeks may reflect concern that Western threats of more punishing sanctions could deliver a further blow to Russia’s economy, already suffering from an investor panic that has reportedly sent about $200 billion in foreign capital fleeing the country. Russian stocks and the ruble have also taken double-digit hits to their values since the Crimean seizure.

Alternatively, the Kremlin leader may have decided that the separatist actions roiling eastern Ukraine have taken on a life of their own and that his open encouragement isn’t needed to undermine Sunday’s vote and Kiev’s attempts to restore order in the country.

Kremlin officials also have seemed less resistant to dealing with a new Ukrainian president since confectionery magnate Petro Poroshenko, who has business interests in Russia, has opened up a commanding lead in the presidential race.

In Kiev, officials of the Interior Ministry and the Security Service told journalists that the voting is expected to transpire peacefully in the vast majority of the 225 election districts across the country. Only in the areas of Donetsk and Luhansk where gunmen hold government facilities are organizers concerned for the safety of voters who attempt to participate in the election denounced by the separatists, said Nikola Holomsha, an Interior Ministry deputy prosecutor general.

Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, head of the Security Service of Ukraine, said government troops had intercepted two convoys of armed separatists and weapons caches they were attempting to bring in from Russia in the early hours of Friday.

“They are trying to stop the election and planning to attack polling places,” Nalyvaichenko said, adding that Ukrainian authorities were doing everything necessary to prevent violence on election day.

Asked if the government’s “anti-terrorist operation” would continue on Sunday, Nalyvaichenko said it would not, but that sufficient police presence would be deployed to protect voters from any insurgent provocations.

Photo: NATO-Russia Council via Flickr

Ukraine Separatists Hold Buildings And Hostages

Ukraine Separatists Hold Buildings And Hostages

By Sergei L. Loiko, Los Angeles Times

MOSCOW — Heavily armed separatists held Ukrainian government buildings and hostages Tuesday as tensions increased sharply and threatened to push a dispute over treatment of the country’s ethnic Russians into bloodshed.

Ukrainian government officials said pro-Russia separatists had rigged explosives in a building in Luhansk and were holding hostages inside. Officials dispatched a deputy prime minister to another city, Donetsk, to try to negotiate a peaceful solution to the takeover of an administration building in that mining city.

Russia seized control of Ukraine’s Crimea region, in the south, with minimal violence in February, but Ukrainian forces have acted forcefully against separatists who took over buildings in the country’s east in recent days. On Tuesday, the Ukrainian government said it had cleared hundreds of pro-Russia protesters from a regional administration building in a third city, Kharkiv.

A move in eastern Ukraine would be far more difficult for Russia than its Crimea seizure was. The region has a sizable ethnic Russian population but, unlike in Crimea, it’s a minority. And Crimea was for centuries part of Russia.

Analysts say it’s crucial for Ukraine’s interim government to manage the discord until May 25 elections. The vote is likely to show that the government does have popular support, they said, blunting Russia’s argument that Ukraine has been taken over by extremists.

Reacting to Ukraine’s moves to impose order, Russia issued a blunt warning Tuesday in a Foreign Ministry statement: “The organizers and participants in the operation are assuming huge responsibility for the creation of threats to the rights, freedoms and lives of peaceful residents of Ukraine.”

It said Ukrainian forces had been augmented by about 150 security contractors from the U.S. private security firm Greystone, who were wearing Ukrainian uniforms.

In Washington, Secretary of State John F. Kerry accused Russia of fomenting unrest.

“Everything that we’ve seen in the past 48 hours from Russian provocateurs and agents operating in eastern Ukraine tells us that they’ve been sent there determined to create chaos,” he said in an appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “No one is fooled by what could potentially be a contrived pretext for military intervention, just as we saw in Crimea.”

Kerry met with President Barack Obama on Tuesday to discuss several issues, including Ukraine.

After the Crimea seizure, the U.S. and European Union imposed sanctions on several Russian officials and associates of President Vladimir Putin. Kerry said the West was considering toughening the sanctions but first wanted to explore the possibility of a diplomatic solution at a meeting this weekend that will include officials from the U.S., EU, Russia and Ukraine.

White House press secretary Jay Carney praised the Ukrainian government for how it has handled the crisis.

The dispute began late last year when Ukraine’s then-president, Viktor Yanukovich, rejected closer association with the European Union in favor of an accord with Russia. That launched months of street protests in Kiev, the capital. Yanukovich ultimately fled and took refuge in Russia.

The deputy head of the Ukrainian Security and Defense Council, Victoria Syumar, said in a post to her Facebook account that about 500 separatists had seized a government building in Luhansk and were holding hostages. “They have more than 1,000 firearms and some heavy weapons. (Ukrainian) special units are ready, but the risks are very serious.”

In Donetsk, tycoon Rinat Akhmetov, a former ally of Yanukovich, was trying to negotiate a solution. Separatists barricaded themselves inside the administration building behind stacks of tires and barbed wire. His appeal to protesters was broadcast live on independent Hromadske TV.

“If there is a storm, I will be with you, suffering together with you, but I want to address the government and ask them … to put off the storm,” he said.

“To fight is not an option,” he added. “Who will be better off if blood is shed?”

First Deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Yarema said he had postponed an operation to clear out the separatists in order to give Akhmetov time to find a solution.

Sergei L. Loiko/Los Angeles Times/MCT