International
Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images
Russia's defense minister on Thursday announced new military exercises on the Ukrainian border, hours after Ukraine's beleaguered government killed five pro-Russian rebels during a military operation in the divided city of Slovyansk. Russia's military exercises seemed to bolster President Vladimir Putin's threat earlier in the day that Kyiv’s offensive would have “consequences.”
In its military operation Thursday, a day after declaring an end to the Easter truce with pro-Russian armed groups, the Ukrainian Interior Ministry said the pro-Russian “terrorists” were killed as paratroopers took over three “illegal checkpoints” around the city, which has been controlled by pro-Russian armed groups for almost two weeks.
Under an international accord — signed in Geneva last week by Ukraine, Russia, the European Union and the United States — illegal armed groups, including the rebels occupying about a dozen public buildings in the largely Russian-speaking east, are supposed to disarm and go home.
Speaking late Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry accused Russia of not taking "a single step" to uphold the deal and de-escalate tensions. He added that Moscow was deliberately trying to "sabotage the democratic process."
But the Kremlin, which has deployed tens of thousands of troops on Ukraine's border, insists it has the right to protect Russian speakers if they come under threat — a reason it gave for annexing the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine last month.
Russia sternly condemned Thursday's operation, with Putin the same day warning Kyiv that its continued deployment of the army against pro-Russian armed groups would constitute “a very serious crime against its own people."
Speaking at an event in St. Petersburg, Putin said any such action was "just a punitive operation, and it will of course incur consequences for the people making these decisions, including [an effect] on our interstate relations."
The operation in Slovyansk came hours after the government reported that its forces had taken control of the town hall in the city of Mariupol, and repelled an attack on an army base in the eastern town of Artemivsk, the ministries said.
Pro-Russian rebel sources also reported the loss of the town hall in Mariupol. The city was the scene of an attack on Ukrainian troops last week that left three rebels dead, though they continued to hold the town hall, as they had since April 13.
"The town hall is liberated and can function normally," Arsen Avakov, Ukraine's interior minister, said on his Facebook page.
The Defense Ministry said in a statement that Ukrainian forces also repelled nearly 100 pro-Russian rebels in an attack on the military base in Artemivsk, just north of rebel-held Donetsk.
"The attackers were repelled and suffered significant losses," said Oleksandr Turchynov, Ukraine's acting president.
Meanwhile, U.S. President Barack Obama said on Thursday that new sanctions against Russia were being "teed up,” in light of Russia’s sharpened rhetoric this week and the ongoing tensions with pro-Russian groups in Ukraine's east, who Kyiv and its Western backers say are being orchestrated by Moscow.
Obama said "malicious armed men" continued to occupy buildings in eastern Ukraine, contravening the Geneva deal. "So far we have seen them not abide by the spirit or the letter of the agreement in Geneva," Obama said.
If this continues, he said, "there will be further consequences and we will ramp up further sanctions."
Moscow denies directly supporting the pro-Russian armed groups operating in Ukraine, though Putin says he reserves the right to intervene militarily in mainland Ukraine — as he did in Crimea — should the interests of Russian speakers be threatened. Russia has massed roughly 40,000 troops just across Ukraine’s eastern border.
On Wednesday, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, warned that Russia would respond if its interests were threatened. He referred to Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, after Georgian forces attacked separatists in its pro-Moscow region of South Ossetia.
“If we are attacked, we would certainly respond,” Lavrov said in an interview with Russia Today, a Kremlin-funded satellite channel. “Russian citizens being attacked is an attack against the Russian Federation.”
But Putin also dismissed Obama’s threat of harsher sanctions on Moscow — a threat that has been on the table since the U.S. imposed an initial set of sanctions on Russian elites after the Crimea annexation.
“Everyone knows … that no sanctions are effective in the modern world, they never have an intended effect,” Putin said on Thursday. “It is absolutely not critical, though I would not say they are a positive thing either.”
Al Jazeera and wire services
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