World powers have been hesitant to make bold declarations as Russia is poised deploys thousands of troops to the Crimea region of Ukraine, giving the embattled country the option to surrender two Ukrainian warships “or face capture,” as reported at Fox News.
The report continued to declare,
“Russia’s fleet also ordered Ukraine’s forces in the region to surrender by 5 a.m. local time Tuesday or face ‘a real assault,’ according to a statement from a Navy commander.”
However, A spokesman for the Russia defense ministry “dismissed the report as ‘total nonsense,'” as reported at USA Today.
Boston.com reports on Border guard spokesman Sergei Astakhov, who said the “Russians were demanding that Ukrainian soldiers and guards transfer their allegiance to Crimea’s new pro-Russian local government.”
‘‘The Russians are behaving very aggressively, they came in by breaking down doors, knocking out windows, cutting off every communication,’’ he said.
Back in the United States, President Obama calls Putin, where he “made clear that Russia’s continued violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity would negatively impact Russia’s standing in the international community” and Secretary of State John Kerry tweets about diplomacy.
We’re going to continue to engage diplomatically. It’s the time for diplomacy. Nobody wants this to spiral in a worse direction.
— John Kerry (@JohnKerry) March 2, 2014
A Democrat Senator, Chris Coons, pointed at President Obama’s weakness in Syria for emboldening Putin, as reported at Breitbart.
The United States says economic sanctions are “likely,” as reported at the Chicago Tribune. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said,
“At this point we are not just considering sanctions given the actions Russia is taking, it is likely we will put those in place and we are preparing that.”
As my LU colleague J.E. Dyer wrote (in a must-read article),
“The important factor in all of this is that it is happening without the slightest regard to the preferences or desires of a ‘global community’ – the putative entity led for the last two decades by the United States. Without U.S. leadership, there is no such entity. And that means all bets are off, and anything is possible.”
That sums it up, doesn’t it?
