Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Tuesday (18 March) signed a treaty making Ukraine’s Crimea region part of Russia, shortly before the Russia-Ukraine confrontation claimed its first casualty. Putin with Crimean separatist leaders in Moscow on Tuesday (Photo: kremlin.ru) He justified the step in a long speech to MPs which described the Black Sea peninsula - signed over by the USSR to Ukraine in 1954 - as quintessentially Russian in cultural and historical terms. He said Kiev is now run by “neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and Russophobes.” He also framed the crisis in geopolitical terms, accusing Western powers of trying to stop him from creating a Eurasian Union by orchestrating “controlled” revolutions. “We understand what is happening, that these actions were directed against Russia and against integration in Eurasia … But everything has its limits. And in the case of Ukraine, our Western partners crossed the line, they were rude, irresponsible,” Putin said. With Russia’s ratification of the Crimea bill to be completed by the end of next week, the annexation looks like a fait accompli. But there are fears Putin will go further. He also told MPs that ethnic Russians in the Ukrainian cities of Donetsk, Kharkiv, and Kiev are “still” appealing for his help and he described Kiev as the “mother of all Russian cities … ancient Russia, our common source.”
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 05:01:25 +0000
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