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U.S. and Allies Meet on Crimea Plan as Ukraine Orders Retreat
Amid Crimea Crisis, Obama Arrives in Europe for High-Stakes Tour
(about 1 hour later)
THE HAGUE — As Russia consolidated its hold on Crimea on Monday, forcing Ukraine to order the retreat of its forces there, President Obama and his international allies prepared to meet here in an effort to develop a strong, united response despite their diverging interests in dealing with the Kremlin.
THE HAGUE — President Obama began a four-day visit to Europe on Monday with a quick tour of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, home to many of the masterworks of Rembrandt and other celebrated Dutch painters, before starting a series of critical consultations with allies about the fast-moving situation in Ukraine.
After Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the lightning annexation of the peninsula by President Vladimir V. Putin last week, Mr. Obama’s decision to convene the leaders of several European countries, along with Canada and Japan, brought the nations — once again the Group of 7, without Russia — together for the first time since the crisis in Ukraine upended the stability and security of Europe.
Mr. Obama’s trip is already being overshadowed by the actions of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The country’s forces seized another Ukrainian military base in Crimea early Monday, as Mr. Obama and other world leaders gathered in the Netherlands. Mr. Obama has called an emergency meeting of the Group of 7 industrial nations that will convene here Monday evening.
As the leaders assembled, however, the authorities in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, said that the defense ministry had ordered the withdrawal of the country’s troops stationed in Crimea who have been the target of a sustained Russian campaign to first blockade and then take over scores of military bases.
“Europe and America are united in our support of the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian people,” Mr. Obama said in a brief statement after touring the museum with Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister.
The latest takeover came before dawn on Monday, the defense ministry in Kiev said, when Russian troops backed by helicopters and armored personnel carriers fired stun grenades as the Ukrainian flag was hauled down at the Feodosia naval base — the third capture of a military base in three days.
Mr. Obama made the remarks while standing in front of “The Night Watch,” Rembrandt’s depiction of a group of 17th-century militiamen. Mr. Obama called it “easily the most impressive backdrop I’ve had for a press conference.” After leaving the museum, Mr. Obama headed to The Hague for the start of a summit meeting on nuclear security with 52 other world leaders.
Some Ukrainian military personnel were driven off in trucks with their arms pinioned and up to 80 troops were taken prisoner, the defense ministry said.
The setting in The Hague of the improvised Group of 7 session and the nuclear security meeting in itself contrasts with the worldview recently offered by Mr. Putin and his power play in Ukraine. The standoff is in stark contrast to the more hopeful tone struck by President Bill Clinton in 1997, when he visited the Netherlands and France to mark progress toward the post-Soviet unification of Europe.
The episode, and its timing, sent a clear signal to Mr. Obama and to other leaders here that their diplomacy had not curbed the Kremlin’s determination to deepen its control of Crimea. The order to Ukrainian soldiers to withdraw seemed to show that Moscow was creating facts on the ground to counter outsiders’ diplomacy.
“In the twilight of the 20th century, we look toward a new century with a new Russia and a new NATO, working together in a new Europe of unlimited possibility,” Mr. Clinton said in Paris that year. “The NATO-Russia Founding Act we have just signed joins a great nation and history’s most successful alliance in common cause for a long-sought but never before realized goal — a peaceful, democratic, undivided Europe.”
Susan E. Rice, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, acknowledged that the president’s weeklong trip, including a meeting with Pope Francis on Thursday and a stop in Saudi Arabia on Friday, would be overshadowed by Ukraine and the need to press for Western unity. She expressed confidence that the meeting here on Monday would “deepen” coordination.
Now, that vision is a distant memory as President Obama on Monday repeated his intent to keep ratcheting up pressure on Mr. Putin. “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.”
But as the United States ratchets up economic sanctions against Russia, it may be difficult for Mr. Obama to bring along European allies, who are more economically intertwined with Russia and who ended their own summit meeting on Friday with no detailed mention of tougher sanctions.
In an earlier briefing in Washington last week, Susan E. Rice, the president’s national security adviser, bluntly acknowledged that the United States is fundamentally reassessing its relationship with Russia. She said the United States wanted to integrate Russia into the world economy but that Mr. Putin’s actions called that policy into question.
In an interview with the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant published before his arrival Monday morning in Amsterdam, Mr. Obama said that he would reassure European allies that no one should “ever question the commitment of the United States to the security of Europe.” He vowed to keep increasing the economic pressure on Russia.
“What we have seen in Ukraine is obviously a very egregious departure from that,” Ms. Rice told reporters. “And it is causing the countries and people of Europe and the international community and, of course, the United States to reassess what does this mean and what are the implications.”
“These aren’t easy choices. We would have preferred it not come to this. But Russia’s actions are simply unacceptable,” Mr. Obama said. “There have to be consequences. And if Russia continues to escalate the situation, we need to be prepared to impose a greater cost.”
The Hague, a generally tranquil city of just under half a million inhabitants, numerous canals and ubiquitous bike paths, is home to both the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, and over the years has attracted some 160 organizations associated with peace, international justice and security.
Convincing the nations of Europe to stay with him may be Mr. Obama’s most urgent task as he arrives here for a two-day summit meeting aimed at eliminating or securing nuclear material around the globe. Mr. Obama will meet with leaders of Europe, Canada and Japan on Monday evening to discuss the crisis.
The Peace Palace, a neo-Gothic structure that houses the International Court of Justice, was opened with great fanfare in August 1913 by Andrew Carnegie. Just a year later, Europe descended into the hell of World War I, rendering the Palace a symbol of humanity’s greatest hopes and disappointments.
“We cannot have countries purporting to annex parts of independent nations,” Mr. Obama said in the interview. “The international law and principles at the heart of our international system have to mean something.”
The Netherlands is so proud of its peaceable modern identity that the duty of the government to promote the development of international law is written into the country’s Constitution. The United Nations tribunal on war crimes in the Balkans in the 1990s spurred a new influx of institutions and experts committed to high ideals of international justice.
A central question seems to be whether Western unity is more than a veneer of principled language and so-far mild sanctions, which, in the absence of any hint of a military response, has made the West seem powerless.
Residents of the city were not universally delighted by the two-day nuclear security summit meeting this week, however. The 53 heads of state and government in attendance led by Mr. Obama, who brought the usual heavy White House security detail with him — mean that much of the city has been closed off around the summit meeting venue.
“It will expose the limitations within the European Union,” said Michael J. Geary, an assistant professor of modern Europe at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, noting that the bloc needs consensus among 28 member states that have disparate ways of dealing with Russia.
Several businesses were asked to close or to have employees work from home. Tens of thousands of police officers and border guards have been deployed in the city, its surroundings and on trains and other transport coming to “the international city of peace and justice,” as The Hague likes to style itself.
NATO and the European Union have been shocked but seem galvanized by Russia’s abrupt abandonment of the rules of cooperation and territorial integrity that have governed East-West relations for decades.
Mr. Obama was scheduled to have a meeting with President Xi Jinping of China before participating in the nuclear security sessions to discuss how to secure or destroy dangerous stockpiles of nuclear material that could be used to build bombs if they are stolen by terrorists. The two-day nuclear talks are the third such meeting of world leaders since Mr. Obama took office and a central part of his promise in 2009 to seek a future that is not threatened by nuclear weapons.
That concern was made clear on Sunday by Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, the American officer who is the supreme commander of NATO’s forces in Europe.
Before meeting with Mr. Xi, 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.
Having praised the efficiency of the Russian move into Crimea — it went, he said, “very much like clockwork” — the general noted that the Russian force now at Ukraine’s eastern border is “very, very sizable, and very, very ready. You cannot defend against that unless you are there.”
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.”
“We have continued to try to make a partner of Russia,” the general told security experts at a meeting in Brussels organized by the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “And now it’s very clear that Russia is acting much more like an adversary than a partner.”
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.”
As the West has struggled to respond cohesively, Russia has moved assertively to establish control in Crimea. On Sunday, a base in Belbek was eerily quiet just 24 hours after it was seized in a dramatic incursion by Russian special-forces troops and two armored vehicles.
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 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.
A commander of the base, Yuli Mamchur, was apparently being held along with other base leaders in Sevastopol, somewhere near the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, said his wife, Larisa Mamchur. She added that most Ukrainian personnel there had been sent home to pack and prepare for relocation to mainland Ukraine.
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.
Even as Russian forces were storming two bases in Crimea on Saturday, though, the Kremlin agreed to allow monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to start a six-month mission in Ukraine — though not in Crimea. The move seemed intended to ease fears that Russian forces would push into eastern or southern Ukraine.
“It only reinforces the need for the United States to remain committed to a strong trans-Atlantic alliance, to the security of Europe, the integration of Europe,” said Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser to Mr. Obama. He said the president’s speech would focus on “the values that the United States and Europe stand for together, including both individual liberty, but also the rights of sovereign nations to make their own decisions and to have their sovereignty and territorial integrity respected.”
In Berlin on Monday, the government spokesman Steffen Seibert said Mr. Putin had confirmed in a conversation with Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday that the mission to Ukraine was “a welcome step.” But he added: “The discussion did not yield any progress on other issues.”
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.
But Mr. Putin’s recent record of first coy, then bold moves has put Mr. Obama and his European allies on guard, even as they have struggled to coordinate. Caught flat-footed by the initial infiltration of Crimea, the United States seems increasingly alarmed about the 20,000 Russian troops that have massed on the border with eastern Ukraine.
The final scheduled stop on Mr. Obama’s trip is a visit to Saudi Arabia.
The other members of the Group of 7 economic partnership hardly have interests identical with those of the United States, and in many ways they are divided even among themselves, complicating any effort to draw a firmer line with Moscow.
Mr. Obama’s sanctions, announced last week, were aimed at sowing pain among members of a Russian economic and political elite who owe their wealth and loyalties to Mr. Putin. But the sanctions were also targeted to minimize disruption to the global economy and to avoid further jeopardizing already meek Russian cooperation on issues like the war in Syria, Iran’s nuclear program, the Middle East and North Korea.
For European countries, the risk of wider conflict with Russia is even graver. Britain hosts Russian billionaires and their money; Germany gets about one-third of its energy from Russia and sells it machinery and cars; France is in the process of delivering sophisticated attack ships to the Kremlin; and Italy depends on Russia for some 28 percent of its energy.
Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, on Saturday became the first Group of 7 leader to visit Ukraine since the crisis erupted. Japan has an interest in whether China — whose president, Xi Jinping, began his first European tour this weekend — draws closer to Moscow or even secures Russian energy supplies in the event that the Kremlin cuts off Western Europe.
While there is scant appetite for a military response, the newer members of NATO — former Warsaw Pact members like Poland, or the three ex-Soviet Baltic states — have anxiously sought reaffirmation that the alliance will protect them if, for example, Russia expands its operations in Crimea.
One of many complicating factors is the state of Ukraine itself. Since the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, Ukraine has failed to muster strong armed forces — a point underscored when its troops abandoned military bases in Crimea last week.
The acting government in Kiev has also been slow to reach out to Russian speakers and specifically to the East. The interim prime minister, Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, did give a speech in Russian last week offering broad autonomy to Ukraine’s eastern regions, which are vital to the country’s weak economy, even with rundown coal mines and outmoded factories.
Constanze Stelzenmüller, a senior trans-Atlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, co-wrote a paper published last week on the crisis and its many implications. “This isn’t going to be easy,” she said over the weekend. “And it’s going to take a long time.”
