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A defiant President Vladimir V Putin claimed Crimea as a part of Russia on Tuesday, reversing what he described as a historic mistake made by the Soviet Union 60 years ago and brushing aside international condemnation that could leave Russia isolated for years to come.
Within minutes of delivering a passionate speech to Russia's political elite, Putin cemented his pledge by signing a draft treaty with Crimean leaders to make the strategic Black Sea peninsula part of Russia. The events unfolded two days after Crimeans voted in a disputed referendum to break away from Ukraine. While the treaty signed Tuesday still needs parliamentary approval, that is regarded as a formality.
"Crimea has always been an integral part of Russia in the hearts and minds of people," Putin declared in his address, delivered in the chandeliered St George's Hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace before hundreds of members of Parliament, governors and others. His remarks, which lasted 47 minutes, were interrupted repeatedly by thunderous applause, standing ovations and at the end chants of "Russia, Russia." Some in the audience wiped tears from their eyes.
Reaching deep into Russian and Soviet history, Putin said he did not seek to divide Ukraine any further, but vowed that he would protect Russia's national security from what he described as Western, and particularly American, actions that had left Russia feeling cornered.
He spoke as he has often in the past of the humiliations Russia has suffered in a world with one dominant superpower - from the NATO air war in Kosovo in 1999 against Moscow's Serbian allies to the one in Libya that toppled Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011 on what he called the false pretense of a humanitarian intervention.
Putin dipped into deep wells of emotion, starting with the 10th century baptism of Prince Vladimir, whose conversion to Orthodox Christianity transformed the kingdom then known as Rus, to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left many Russians of his generation feeling that they had been stripped of their nation overnight.
"Millions of Russians went to bed in one country and woke up abroad," he said. "Overnight, they were minorities in the former Soviet republics, and the Russian people became one of the biggest - if not the biggest - divided nation in the world."
Assailing the West for what he has said were its broken promises, he said: "They cheated us again and again, made decisions behind our back, presenting us with completed facts. That's the way it was with the expansion of NATO in the east, with the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders. They always told us the same thing: 'Well, this doesn't involve you.'
In a deepening clash of wills, Western reaction was swift. Britain's foreign secretary, William Hague, told Parliament on Tuesday that the crisis in Ukraine "is the most serious test of European security in the 21 century so far."
"No amount of sham and perverse democratic process or skewed historical references can make up for the fact that this is an incursion into a sovereign state and a land grab of part of its territory with no respect for the law of that country or for international law," he said.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel firmly rejected Moscow's absorption of Crimea, a position she said was widely supported by international organisations including the United Nations and the European Council.
"The so-called referendum breached international law, the declaration of independence which the Russian president accepted yesterday was against international law, and the absorption into the Russian Federation is, in our firm opinion, also against international law," Ms. Merkel told reporters in Berlin.
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., in Warsaw on Tuesday in a show of support for countries unnerved by the Russian incursion into Ukraine, rebutted Mr. Putin's assertions. "Russia has offered a variety of arguments to justify what is nothing more than a land grab," he said. "But the world has rejected those arguments."
While Western sanctions in response to Sunday's referendum on independence in Crimea had been relatively mild, American officials had already made clear they would ratchet up the pressure if Mr. Putin went ahead with annexation. The Obama administration is expected to react quickly with a new round of sanctions targeting three groups: Russian government officials, the Russian arms industry and Russians who work on behalf of government officials, the latter called "Russian government cronies" by a senior American official.
Mr. Putin brushed aside concerns about economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation, saying the West had forced Russia's hand. By supporting the political uprising that toppled Ukraine's president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, the United States and Europe crossed "a red line," Mr. Putin said, forcing him to act to protect Crimea's population from what he called "Russophobes and neo-Nazis" that had seized control in an illegal coup abetted by foreigners.
"If you press a spring too hard," he said, "it will recoil."
If there had been any doubt before Tuesday, Mr. Putin made clear that within what he considers his sphere of interest he would not be cowed by international pressure. And the speed of his moves in Crimea, redrawing an international border that has been recognised as part of an independent Ukraine since 1991, has been breathtaking.
Just three weeks after Russian special operations troops seized control of strategic locations on the peninsula, the authorities there organised and held a disputed referendum that paved the way for Tuesday's treaty signing. Mr. Putin called the outcome of the vote - almost 97 percent in favour of secession -- "more than convincing."
Mr. Putin acted despite the first of a series of threatened sanctions imposed by the United States, Canada and Europe on Monday. He did so using the same arguments that those countries used to justify the independence of Kosovo - which the West generally supported - including a passage from an Obama administration document establishing the legal rationale for recognising that country.
Part of the speech also had an ominous tone, suggesting that Russian dissenters would be considered traitors siding with Russia's adversaries. Mr. Putin has long suspected the United States of trying to stir up a democratic uprising in Russia along the lines of Ukraine's Orange Revolution and the Arab Spring rebellions.
"Some Western politicians already threaten us not only with sanctions but also with the potential for domestic problems," he said. "I would like to know what they are implying - the actions of a certain fifth column, of various national traitors? Or should we expect that they will worsen the social and economic situation, and therefore provoke people's discontent?
Mr. Putin also spoke of the radically changed circumstances since 1954, when Russia awarded Crimea to Ukraine. At that time, he said, "nobody could imagine that Russia and Ukraine could one day become different states." After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia felt it was "robbed" of Crimea, he said.
He was at pains to rebut the central Western argument that events in Crimea had been directed by a conventional military intervention. Mr. Putin said Russia never exceeded its permitted troop strength of 25,000 soldiers in Crimea as part of the longstanding agreement on the stationing of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol.
There had been no combat, he said, and he thanked Ukrainian soldiers who avoided bloodshed. "I cannot remember a single act of intervention without one single shot" being fired, he said.
However, within hours of that declaration, a group of soldiers opened fire while storming a Ukrainian military garrison in Kubanskoye, near Simferopol. At least one Ukrainian soldier was injured and taken to a hospital, according to a Ukrainian officer inside the base and a spokesman for Ukraine's Ministry of Defense, Vladislav Seleznev. The base appeared to be under control of the soldiers, who wore no insignia.
Buoyed by the crisis, Mr. Putin has vaulted past every line the United States and Europe have tried to draw in recent weeks. The White House indicated that it had not gone after some members of Mr. Putin's inner circle to leave room for its next move, which the Americans and Europeans might now have to consider making sooner than they expected.
President Obama's initial sanctions froze assets and banned travel for 11 Russian and Ukrainian figures, including Vladislav Y. Surkov, a longtime adviser to Mr. Putin; Dmitri O. Rogozin, a deputy prime minister of Russia; and Valentina I. Matviyenko, a Putin ally and the chairwoman of the Federation Council, the upper house of Russia's Parliament. The European Union followed with sanctions against 21 Russian and Ukrainian figures.
"We're making it clear that there are consequences for their actions," Mr. Obama said as he announced the sanctions. "We'll continue to make clear to Russia that further provocations will achieve nothing except to further isolate Russia and diminish its place in the world."
Over all, the Europeans targeted 10 Russian politicians, seven pro-Russian Crimeans, three Russian military officers in Crimea and the former leader of Ukraine's Black Sea Fleet, who defected to Russia this month. But the Europeans declined to go after elite figures like Mr. Surkov and Mr. Rogozin out of reluctance to poke Mr. Putin too directly.
Asked whether the European Union had failed to match tough words with strong actions, Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, told journalists: "The U.S. is from Mars and Europe is from Venus. Get used to it."
He noted that "Europe is closer and will therefore pay a bigger cost for sanctions against Russia." He also pointed to Europe's collective decision-making process.
"In the United States, one man takes a decision on the basis of an executive order," Mr. Sikorski said, "whereas in Europe, for these measures to be legal, we need a consensus of 28 member states."
The bravado in Moscow struck some American officials as bluster masking real concern about the potential financial bite of future sanctions, and there is some evidence that Russians are anxiously pulling tens of billions of dollars out of American accounts. Nearly $105 billion was shifted out of Treasury custodial accounts by foreign central banks or other institutions in the week that ended last Wednesday, more than three times that of any other recent week.
©2014 The New York Times News Service
