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World Leaders Will Exclude Putin From Summit Meeting Russia Is Ousted From Group of 8 by U.S. and Allies
(about 4 hours later)
THE HAGUE — President Obama and the leaders of the biggest Western economies agreed on Monday to exclude President Vladimir V. Putin from the Group of 8, suspending his government’s 15-year participation in the diplomatic forum and further isolating his country. THE HAGUE — The United States and its closest allies on Monday cast Russia out of the Group of 8 industrialized democracies, their most exclusive club, to punish President Vladimir V. Putin for his lightning annexation of Crimea, while threatening tougher sanctions if he escalates aggression against Ukraine.
In a joint statement after a two-hour, closed-door meeting of the four largest economies in Europe, along with Japan and Canada, the leaders of the seven nations announced that a summit meeting planned for Sochi, Russia, in June will now be held in Brussels — without Russia’s participation. President Obama and the leaders of Canada, Japan and Europe’s four strongest economies gathered for the first time since the Ukraine crisis erupted last month, using a closed two-hour meeting on the sidelines of a summit about nuclear security to project a united front against Moscow.
“This group came together because of shared beliefs and shared responsibilities. Russia’s actions in recent weeks are not consistent with them,” the statement said. “Under these circumstances, we will not participate in the planned Sochi Summit. We will suspend our participation in the G-8 until Russia changes course.” But they stopped short, at least for now, of imposing sanctions against what a senior Obama administration official called vital sectors of the Russian economy: energy, banking and finance, engineering and the arms industry. Only further aggression by Mr. Putin — like rolling his forces into the Ukrainian mainland — would prompt that much-harsher punishment, the countries indicated in their joint statement, called the Hague Declaration.
The move by the group —its first face-to-face gathering since Russia’s lightning-quick annexation of the Crimea a month ago — was intended as another signal of the West’s condemnation of Russia’s actions. Leaders said it represented only part of a series of punishments that might still escalate if Russia refuses to turn back its aggressions, the statement said. “The biggest hammer that can drop is sectoral sanctions, and the clearest trigger for those is eastern and southern Ukraine,” the senior administration official said.
In particular, the countries agreed to consider broader sanctions against large sectors of the Russian economy. Mr. Obama had signaled last week that the United States was prepared to take such a move, and officials said his decision to call a meeting of the G-8 countries was in part intended to persuade them to do the same. Some critics of the administration said the suspension of Russia from the G-8, which administration officials acknowledged was largely symbolic, showed a lack of resolve among the allies to take tougher steps to undo Mr. Putin’s annexation of Ukraine.
“We remain ready to intensify actions including coordinated sectoral sanctions that will have an increasingly significant impact on the Russian economy, if Russia continues to escalate this situation,” the leaders’ statement said. Such sanctions could have an outsized impact on European economies that have close trade and investment ties to Russia. But it signified a firming of Western resolve compared with the early days of the Crimea crisis, when Germany and some other allies said it was premature to consider excluding Russia from the club of industrial democracies. Having Russia as part of that group since 1998 was meant to signal cooperation between East and West, and its exclusion inevitably raises new echoes of Cold War-style rivalry.
Before the meeting, other leaders also indicated that Russia’s actions had now left the country on the outside of the group. British Prime Minister David Cameron told reporters that “we should be clear there’s not going to be a G-8 summit this year in Russia. That’s absolutely clear.” Announcing that they would boycott a Group of 8 meeting planned for Sochi — Mr. Putin’s Black Sea showcase for the recent Winter Olympics — the seven countries who met here said they would instead gather by themselves in June in Brussels, headquarters of NATO and the European Union.
Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a similar clue that the group might shed Russia in a speech to the German parliament last week, saying that “so long as the political context” is absent, “then the G-8 no longer exists, either as a summit or as a format.” “We will suspend our participation in the G-8 until Russia changes course,” the seven countries declared in what constituted a subtle appeal to Russian leaders outside Mr. Putin’s circle to press for a switch in direction.
The G-8 is a forum long-prized by the Germans. But Ms. Merkel has sounded increasingly firm — and frustrated — with Mr. Putin. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia eagerly sought to join the tight circle of the world’s top economies, eventually gaining entry in 1998. For all that Mr. Putin shrugged off the threat of canceling the Sochi summit this month — a shoulder shrug imitated here by his foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, on Monday — it is a blow to the Kremlin’s search for prestige.
Last week, she stressed that “we are ready at any time to introduce phase-3 measures if there is a worsening of the situation,” referring to the so-called third stage of sanctions — tough economic measures that would likely hurt German business as well as Russia. Mr. Putin took membership in the group so seriously that he went all out when it came time for Russia to host the annual meeting for the first time. He rebuilt a broken-down czarist-era palace outside his hometown, St. Petersburg, in part with the summit in mind, adding a series of new mansions to the grounds for each leader to stay in. The Kremlin hired a Western public relations agency to promote its status as host.
Early Monday, Mr. Obama expressed solidarity with Ukraine. “Europe and America are united in our support of the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian people,” he said after touring the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam with Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister. “Obviously, it’s mostly symbolic, but symbols do matter,” said Michael A. McFaul, the just-departed American ambassador to Moscow. “The G-8 was something they wanted to be part of. This for them was a symbol of being part of the big-boy club, the great power club — and the club of democracies, I might add.”
Mr. Obama made his remarks while standing in front of “The Night Watch,” Rembrandt’s depiction of a group of 17th-century militiamen, calling it “easily the most impressive backdrop I’ve had for a news conference.” The Obama administration voiced satisfaction that the West was united in punishing Russia, both now and in future, if it does not reverse course. “There really wasn’t much disagreement” at the meeting either about Russia or the need to swiftly aid Ukraine, the senior administration official said.
“We’re united in imposing a cost on Russia for its actions so far,” Mr. Obama said, adding that “the growing sanctions would bring significant consequences to the Russian economy.” Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, who with her foreign minister has had the most contact with Mr. Putin and other Russian officials during this crisis, has been among the most forthright in rejecting Mr. Putin’s actions, despite the potential costs to Germany’s economy.
For now, the costs were being felt more by Ukraine. Even as Mr. Obama and other world leaders gathered, Russian forces seized another Ukrainian military base in Crimea, which Russia has declared as annexed. German businesses sold almost 40 billion euros of goods to Russia last year, and bought Russian imports of the same value, almost exclusively oil and natural gas supplies that meet about one-third of Germany’s energy needs.
Ukraine’s acting president, Oleksander Turchinov, told the parliament in Kiev that the Defense Ministry had ordered military personnel and their families out of Crimea following threats by Russian forces, according to Reuters. But Ms. Merkel has strengthened Germany’s response over the past two weeks after she perceived Mr. Putin as violating promises by annexing Crimea and opting for old-fashioned nationalism and the use of military force over the talk of cooperation and respect for borders that have governed East-West relations in recent decades.
At a news conference, Vladyslav Seleznyov, spokesman for the Defense Ministry, declined to say what order the forces had been given. He also said he did not know how many Ukrainians had gone over to Russia’s side. The support of Germany, the largest economy in Europe and a longtime bellwether on Russian relations, is viewed as crucial to enforcing tougher sanctions if they become necessary down the road. The administration official said that any such sanctions would have “consequences for the global economy and individual countries.”
The Ukrainian military’s humiliating retreat has delivered a damaging blow to the country’s fragile interim government in Kiev, piling further pressure on a leadership already struggling to assert its authority and find money to pay salaries and pensions and keep the country running. “The cost is far greater for the Russians, who stand much more to lose,” the official added.
“The situation is very complicated,” Oleksandr Sych, vice prime minister, told a news conference in Kiev, as Mr. Obama and other leaders met in The Netherlands. “We are just thinking about how to survive for the next few months. The treasury is empty but we have to somehow survive.” Russia argues that Crimea has effectively been Russian territory since the 18th century and was put under Ukrainian sovereignty only by the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev in 1954 as a gesture of good will inside the Soviet Union. It says its military intervention was meant to protect Russian speakers from Ukrainian nationalists who helped topple the previous, more pro-Russian government.
The Ukraine crisis overshadowed Mr. Obama’s scheduled four-day trip, a centerpiece of which was a summit meeting on Monday on nuclear security with 52 other world leaders. But Western leaders have condemned the military incursion as a violation of both international law and specific Russian agreements with Ukraine and the outside world, and disputed Russian claims that ethnic Russians faced threats to their security in Crimea or elsewhere in Ukraine.
The two-day talks are the third such meeting since Mr. Obama took office and a central part of his promise in 2009 to seek a future unthreatened by nuclear weapons. The discussions this week were aimed at how to secure or destroy dangerous stockpiles of nuclear material that could be used to build bombs if they are stolen by terrorists. The leaders met on the sidelines of a nuclear security summit arranged in advance of the Ukraine crisis. Ms. Merkel, speaking to German reporters, noted that the two issues were deeply linked. Ukraine, she recalled, renounced its Soviet-era nuclear weapons in 1994 by concluding the Budapest Memorandum, an agreement with the United States, Britain and Russia to guarantee the integrity of Ukraine.
Beforehand, Mr. Obama met with President Xi Jinping of China. Mr. Obama told reporters that the two would discuss climate change, the situation in Ukraine and efforts to stop North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. He also said that he planned to raise with Mr. Xi issues that have added to tensions between China and the United States in recent years. That accord “has been flagrantly violated,” she noted.
Mr. Obama said the two leaders would use the meeting to “work through frictions that exist in our relations around issues like human rights, in dealing with maritime issues in the South China Sea and the Pacific region, in a way that is constructive and hopefully will lead to resolutions.” Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, stressed in a speech to the full summit that he worried some current or future nuclear powers could view the weapons as crucial to protect themselves against invasion, undermining hopes of reducing their spread.
He added that he intended to talk about economic issues and trade in the hopes of making sure that “we are both abiding by the rules that allow for us to create jobs and prosperity in both of our countries.” “Nuclear weapons should be seen as a liability and not an asset,” he said.
Speaking with an English translator, Mr. Xi told Mr. Obama that there was “greater space where China and the United States are cooperating” and thanked Mr. Obama for expressing sympathy over the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, which had 154 passengers from China or Taiwan on board, and for American help in the search for the plane. There was no mention in the Monday declaration of how much assistance the West will now give Ukraine, either in cash or in bolstering a relatively weak acting government until elections scheduled for May 25.
He also said that he wants to pursue what he called a “major power relationship” with the United States, something that Mr. Obama had suggested in a recent letter to Mr. Xi. Ukraine has said it needs €1 billion in immediate assistance, and the European Union is readying a further €11 billion for this year, mostly through lending by European institutions.
On Wednesday, Mr. Obama will leave the Netherlands for a daylong summit meeting with European Union leaders in Brussels and to discuss the situation in Russia with the Secretary General of NATO. While in Brussels, Mr. Obama will deliver a speech that aides said would be heavily influenced by Mr. Putin’s recent actions and the threat they pose to Europe. The declaration emphasized instead the “central role” of the International Monetary Fund in “lessening Ukraine’s economic vulnerabilities, and better integrating the country as a market economy in the multilateral system.”
Mr. Obama will fly to Rome on Thursday for a meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican. Aides said the president was eager to discuss the pope’s “commitment to address issues like income inequality,” a subject that Mr. Obama has sought to highlight as an election-year issue at home. But veteran observers of the Vatican said the pope might use the opportunity to discuss other issues as well, including abortion, religious liberty and contraception. “We remain united in our commitment to provide strong financial backing to Ukraine,” The Hague Declaration said, specifying that it would bolster trade and strengthen security in the key field of energy.
The final scheduled stop on Mr. Obama’s trip is a visit to Saudi Arabia. European powers that depend heavily on Russia for natural gas also indicated that they would pursue a strategy to reduce dependence on Russian energy by June, though any effort to shift suppliers is likely to take many months or years.