Amid
fears of further Russian military moves in Ukraine, G7 meets in The Hague
without Russia for the first time since 1998
Western countries and Japan have suspended their 16-year
collaboration with Russia
in the G8
group in response to the annexation of Crimea
and have threatened sweeping sanctions in the event of any Russian military
moves in the region.
The move, a clear and deliberate break from the post-Soviet
status quo, was intended to underline Russian isolation. Leaders from the US,
UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan met in The Hague as the G7 for the
first time since Russian was brought into the group in 1998 to seal east-west
co-operation and lay the cold war to rest.
The G7 leaders issued a joint statement, under the title of
the Hague Declaration,saying they would not attend a planned G8 summit in Sochi
in June but would instead convene without Russia in Brussels. The group's
foreign ministers would also boycott a planned G8 meeting in Moscow in April.
The declaration said Russia's actions were not consistent with the "shared
beliefs and shared responsibilities" that had made the formation of the G8
possible.
As Russian troops appeared to mass on Ukraine's
eastern border, the G7 statement hinted at much broader sanctions if Russia
made further expansionist moves.
"We remain ready to intensify actions including
co-ordinated sectoral sanctions that will have an increasingly significant
impact on the Russian economy, if Russia continues to escalate this
situation," the statement said.
The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, shrugged off
the loss of G8 membership as being inconsequential. "The G8 is an informal
club, with no formal membership, so no one can be expelled from it. If our
western partners believe that such format is no longer needed, so be it. We
aren't clinging for that format and we won't see a big problem if there are no
such meetings for a year, or a year-and-half," said Lavrov after his first
meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart, Andrii Deshchytsia, at the margins of
the global Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague, Netherlands.
The Ukrainian embassy in The Hague said in its account of
the meeting: "Lavrov stressed that Russia has no intention of using
military force in the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine. The two sides
agreed to hold emergency consultations at the level of the ministries of
foreign affairs and the ministries of defence of both countries in the case of
exacerbation of the situation."
Lavrov said little about the meeting but confirmed he had
agreed to maintain contacts with the Kiev government.
Before arriving in The Hague, David Cameron has said that
Britain and its Nato allies would help bolster the defences of the alliance's
Baltic members, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, who have Russian minorities and
which fear destabilisation by Moscow.
Obama also sought to deepen Russian isolation in a meeting
in The Hague with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, in which he asked that
Beijing at least maintain its stance of neutrality in the stand-off and
continue to reaffirm its commitment to the rule of international law and
non-interference in the affairs of sovereign states.
US officials acknowledged that Xi had given little by way of
formal response to the request, but the Chinese leader appeared to go out of
his way to emphasise a warm and personal relationship with Barack Obama,
heaping praise on the US president's wife and daughters who have just visited
China and jokingly conveyed Michelle Obama's greetings to her husband.
The US deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes,
stressed that the crisis was not a return to the cold war, because this time
Moscow stood virtually alone. "The fact is Russia is leading no bloc of
countries. There's no ideological entity, like communism, that Russia is
leading that has global appeal," Rhodes said. "There's no bloc of
nations, like the Warsaw Pact, that they're leading. They're isolated in what they're
doing in Ukraine. And I think that's very much the message that we want to send
at the G7, with the EU, with Nato over the course of the next several
days."
Britain's foreign secretary, William
Hague, described the winding up of the G8 as a "huge blow"
adding that Obama had made it clear that "it will then be hard to revive
that in the immediate future".
Hague insisted that Britain would play a wholehearted part
in the tightening of sanctions if the crisis escalated, despite potential
economic costs to the UK.
He said tougher sanctions would mean that "many
countries bear the cost of that in many ways" but "we have to be
prepared to do that".
"Every country would have to do what is necessary if
more far-reaching sanctions were applied, accepting that that would affect
different economies in different ways," he said. "The United Kingdom
is certainly prepared to do that. There is nothing that other countries in Europe
have proposed that we have blocked. The United Kingdom is fully prepared to
play its full part."
Shortly before his meeting with Lavrov, Deshchytsia, the
acting Ukrainian foreign minister, had said his government had been seeking a
peaceful settlement to a crisis that was in imminent danger of escalating.
"We wanted to find out what they are thinking about
Ukraine and what they are thinking of their plans towards Ukraine,"
Deshchytsia said. "We want to live peacefully with Russia. We want our
nations to coexist and they will coexist. So we wanted to sit down around the
table and find a solution, maybe drink vodka. But since we don't know their
plans, the possibility for a military intervention is very high taking into
consideration the intel information about the deployment of a very big number
of Russian troops on the eastern borders of Ukraine."
"We are very much worried about the concentration of troops
on our eastern borders but at the same time we are ready to defend our
homeland. Our military and civilians living in eastern Ukraine – Ukrainians,
Russians other nationalities - are ready to defend their homeland, and our
military is also ready to defend Ukraine."
Culled from theguardian.com
No comments:
Post a Comment