[The developments
underscored how quickly the crisis has evolved. Earlier this week, President
Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had said he did not foresee the possibility of the
Crimean Peninsula becoming part of Russia. But on Friday, Russia’s
parliamentary leaders, both strong allies of Mr. Putin, welcomed a delegation
from Crimea’s regional assembly and declared that they would support a vote to
break away from Ukraine, now scheduled for March 16.]
By Steven Lee Myers, David M. Herszenhorn and Rick
Gladstone
MOSCOW — Russia signaled for the first time on Friday that it was
prepared to annex the Crimea region of Ukraine, significantly intensifying its
confrontation with the West over the political crisis in Ukraine and
threatening to undermine a system of respect for national boundaries that has
helped keep the peace in Europe and elsewhere for decades.
Leaders of both houses
of Russia’s Parliament said that they would support a vote by Crimeans to break
away from Ukraine and become a region of the Russian Federation, ignoring
sanction threats and warnings, from the United States and other countries, that
a vote for secession would violate Ukraine’s Constitution and international
law. The Russian message was yet another in a series of political and military
actions undertaken over the past week that outraged the West, even while the
Kremlin’s final intentions remained unclear.
As new tensions flared
between Russian and Ukrainian forces in Crimea, the moves by Russia raised the
specter of a protracted conflict over the status of the region, which Russian
forces occupied last weekend, calling into question not only Russia’s relations
with the West but also post-Cold War agreements on the sovereignty of the
nations that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The developments
underscored how quickly the crisis has evolved. Earlier this week, President
Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had said he did not foresee the possibility of the
Crimean Peninsula becoming part of Russia. But on Friday, Russia’s
parliamentary leaders, both strong allies of Mr. Putin, welcomed a delegation
from Crimea’s regional assembly and declared that they would support a vote to
break away from Ukraine, now scheduled for March 16.
The referendum has
been denounced by the fledgling national government in Kiev, which said it
would invalidate the outcome and dissolve the Crimean Parliament. President
Obama has also rejected the referendum, and the United States government
announced sanctions on Thursday in response to Russia’s de facto military occupation.
Russia denounced those
sanctions in a blunt rejoinder on Friday evening, posted on the Foreign
Ministry website. The statement said that Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V.
Lavrov, had spoken by telephone with Secretary of State John Kerry and warned
that “hasty and ill-considered steps” to impose sanctions on Russian officials
“would inevitably backfire on the United States itself.”
Russia’s Interfax news
agency reported that Mr. Lavrov and Mr. Kerry would soon meet again. A senior
State Department official traveling with Mr. Kerry, who was flying back to
Washington after a trip to Europe and the Middle East, confirmed that Mr. Kerry
had spoken with Mr. Lavrov, but that it was unclear when they would meet again.
The Russians also sent
menacing economic signals to the financially ailing interim central government
in Kiev, which Russia has refused to recognize. Gazprom, the Russian natural
gas monopoly, which supplies Ukraine with most of its gas, warned that it might
shut off supplies unless Ukraine paid $1.89 billion owed to the company.
“We cannot deliver gas
for free,” Russian news agencies quoted Gazprom’s chief executive, Alexei
Miller, as saying.
Gazprom cut off gas to
Ukraine for nearly two weeks in January 2009, causing severe economic problems
for Ukraine and for other European customers who were dependent on supplies
delivered through Ukraine.
Valentina I.
Matviyenko, the chairwoman of the upper house of the Russian Parliament, the
Federation Council, compared the planned referendum in Crimea to Scotland’s
scheduled vote on whether to become independent from Britain. She did not
mention that the national government in Britain had agreed to hold a
referendum, while the Ukrainian government has not.
The speaker of the
Russian lower house, Sergei Y. Naryshkin, echoed Ms. Matviyenko’s remarks. “We
will respect the historic choice of the people of Crimea,” he said.
Their assertions came
a day after Crimea’s regional assembly voted in a closed session to secede from
Ukraine and apply to join the Russian Federation, and to hold a referendum for
voters in the region to ratify the decision. On Friday, a delegation of
lawmakers from Crimea arrived in Moscow to lay the groundwork for joining
Russia, strongly supported by senior lawmakers.
In another telling
sign of Russian government support, the Crimean delegates were cheered at an
officially sanctioned rally in central Moscow that was shown at length on
Russian state television, with songs and chants of “Russia, Moscow, Crimea.”
News agencies quoted the police as saying 60,000 people attended.
Even if the referendum
proceeds, it was unclear what would happen next, given the wide gap between the
positions of Russia and the West — most notably between Mr. Putin and Mr.
Obama, who spoke for an hour by phone on Thursday night.
According to the White
House, Mr. Obama urged Mr. Putin to authorize direct talks with Ukraine’s new
government, permit the entry of international monitors and return his forces to
the bases that Russia leases in Crimea.
In a statement, the
Kremlin offered a starkly different account of the phone call, emphasizing
Russia’s view that the new government in Kiev had no authority because it was
the result of what Mr. Putin called an anticonstitutional coup last month that
had ousted Viktor F. Yanukovych, the pro-Kremlin president.
The official Russian
account of the phone call went on to say that the current Ukrainian leadership
had imposed “absolutely illegitimate decisions” on the eastern and southeastern
regions of the country, where pro-Russian sentiment is widespread. “Russia
cannot ignore appeals connected to this, calls for help, and acts
appropriately, in accordance with international law,” the statement said.
In the United States,
Mr. Obama was taking a wait-and-see attitude. He spoke by phone to Chancellor
Angela Merkel of Germany, who has been reluctant to pursue muscular sanctions
against Russia because of the deep and interwoven economic relationship between
the two countries. He headed to Florida for a speech on education and then a
weekend off with his family, but aides promised he would be monitoring the
crisis.
“We’re hopeful that in
the next few days, we’ll get greater clarity about whether or not the Russians
are willing to take some concrete steps toward this offramp here,” said Josh
Earnest, a White House spokesman.
In Kiev, anti-Russian
sentiment was hardening. The Right Sector movement, a nationalist group that
was important in the deadly protests last month that drove Mr. Yanukovych from
power, announced that its leader, Dmytro Yarosh, would run for president.
Andriy Tarasenko, chairman of its local branch, also said the group was
prepared to fight, in Crimea and elsewhere, “if the Kremlin tramples on us
further.”
With Washington and
Moscow trading heated accusations of hypocrisy on the issue of respecting state
sovereignty, validating Crimea’s secession would carry pointed political risks
for Mr. Putin, given longstanding demands for independence from Russia by its
own similarly autonomous republics in the Caucasus, including Dagestan and
Chechnya.
Michael A. McFaul, a
former American ambassador to Russia, noted the parallel in a sharp post on
Twitter. “If Russian government endorses Crimean referendum,” Mr. McFaul wrote,
using abbreviations needed for a 140-character limit, “will they also allow/endorse
similar votes in republics in the Russian Federation?”
The West, which has
insisted that the Ukrainian people are entitled to decide their future without
interference from Russia, faces similar challenges as it seeks to explain why
the people of Crimea should not necessarily decide their own fate.
The United States and
its European allies typically support self-determination, but have opposed
independence for regions within their own borders, like Scotland in Britain or
Catalonia in Spain.
There was no sign on
Friday that Russian armed forces were relaxing their tight clench on the
Crimean Peninsula, with military bases surrounded and border crossings under
strict control. There were news reports late Friday that pro-Russian militants
had smashed through the gates of a Ukrainian Air Force base in the port of
Sevastopol housing 100 Ukrainian troops, but that no shots had been fired.
There were also reports that a number of Ukrainian journalists had been beaten
by masked attackers and were missing.
For the second
consecutive day, an observer mission from the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe, the 57-member organization that includes both Ukraine
and Russia, was prevented from entering Crimea at a
checkpoint blocked by armed men.
Astrid Thors, an envoy
from the group who had gone to Crimea earlier in the week, said in a telephone
interview from Amsterdam that she had faced noisy, threatening crowds chanting
pro-Russian slogans during her visit and had been forced to leave. Ms. Thors,
the group’s high commissioner for national minorities, said she could have
experienced the sort of predicament faced by a senior United Nations diplomat,
Robert H. Serry, who was chased out of Crimea by gunmen earlier this week.
“There was a risk the
same could happen, that our movement could be hindered by the crowds,” Ms.
Thors said. “We took precautionary principles. We shortened our stay.”
Steven Lee Myers reported from
Moscow, David M. Herszenhorn from Simferopol, Ukraine, and Rick Gladstone from
New York. Reporting was contributed by Alan Cowell from London; Ellen Barry
from Moscow; Michael R. Gordon from Shannon, Ireland; Alissa J. Rubin from
Brussels; Peter Baker from Washington; Steven Erlanger from Kiev, Ukraine;
Somini Sengupta from the United Nations; and Noah Sneider from Simferopol.