NATO Chief on Putin's Reassurances:
Don't Believe It
By Andra Timu, Indira A.R. Lakshmanan & Kateryna Choursina
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said President Vladimir Putin’s assurances that Russia has no plans to intervene further in Ukraine can’t be believed, amid continued unrest in the run-up to the May 25 election.
“After what we have seen in Ukraine, no one can trust the so-called guarantees given by Russia about sovereignty and integrity,” Rasmussen told reporters in Bucharest today at a briefing with Romanian President Traian Basescu. “We want Russia to respect its international obligations and stop trying to destabilize the situation.”
NATO says Putin, who annexed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in March, still has 40,000 troops on Ukraine’s border and hasn’t fulfilled a promise last week to pull them back. The U.S. and the U.K. vowed yesterday to punish Russia with industrywide sanctions if the presidential election is undermined as the Kiev government’s forces moved to flush out separatists in the east.
“If Russia or its proxies disrupt the elections,” the U.S. and its allies “will impose sectoral economic sanctions as a result,” Secretary of State John Kerry said in London yesterday after meeting his counterparts from Britain, Italy, France and Germany. Pro-Russian separatists “are literally sowing mayhem,” seeking to “speak for everyone through the barrel of a gun.”
Russian Markets
Russia’s benchmark Micex Index of stocks was down 0.1 percent at 3:15 p.m. in Moscow. It’s dropped 4.5 percent since the start of Putin’s intervention in Crimea on March 1. The ruble lost 0.2 percent to 34.8319 versus the dollar. Ukraine’s hryvnia, which has lost 31 percent against the U.S. currency in 2014, declined 1.1 percent today, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
The United Nations high commissioner for refugees, Navi Pillay, said today a report produced by her 34-strong monitoring team in Ukraine shows “an alarming deterioration in the human rights situation in the east of the country.”
The monitors criticized “repeated acts of violence against peaceful participants of rallies, mainly those in support of Ukraine’s unity” as well as “targeted killings, torture and beatings, abductions, intimidation and some cases of sexual harassment –- mostly carried out by well-organized and well-armed anti-government groups in the east.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said on its website the report wasn’t objective and used double standards.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
In eastern Ukraine, government troops eliminated two rebel bases near the towns of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, acting President Oleksandr Turchynov said yesterday.
The U.S. and the EU have already penalized 98 people and 20 companies over Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Should it interfere in the planned election, Russia will face punitive measures targeting entire industries, which may include energy, banking, defense and mining, according to a U.S. official who asked not to be identified following diplomatic protocol. The U.S. and its European allies agreed that industrywide sanctions would come next, the official said.
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