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By Matt Spetalnick and Warren Strobel
WASHINGTON, March 1 (Reuters) – As Russia deepened its
military intervention in Ukraine’s Crimea region on Saturday,
ignoring Barack Obama’s stern warning, the U.S. president faced
a critical test of whether Washington has the leverage or the
will to get Moscow to back down.
Obama, who has avoided entanglement in global crises where
possible and focused on domestic affairs, now finds himself in
the midst of the most dangerous East-West standoff since the end
of the Cold War.
U.S. officials have said for months they did not want
Ukraine’s political crisis to turn into a Washington-Moscow tug
of war. But on Saturday, a week after Ukraine’s Russian-backed
president was ousted in a tide of popular anger, Obama’s foreign
policy aides rushed to craft a response to Russian President
Vladimir Putin’s blunt moves.
Putin’s parliament gave him the authority to invade Ukraine,
which he regards as part of Russia’s sphere of influence and
where his troops have apparently already seized the Crimea
peninsula.
In what appeared to be a tough 90-minute phone call with
Putin on Saturday, Obama condemned Russia’s military
intervention in Ukraine and warned that it could face further
political and economic isolation, the White House said. Obama
told the Russian leader that Washington was suspending
participation in meetings to prepare for this summer’s G-8
meetings in Sochi, Russia.
But Putin had brushed aside Obama’s threat on Friday that
“there will be costs” for any use of force in Ukraine. The
Russian leader, whom Obama once hoped to make a partner, now
seems a determined adversary.
He appears to be calculating that Obama’s willingness to go
to the mat over Ukraine, a country few Americans know much
about, does not match Russia’s readiness to assert itself over a
former Soviet republic with which it has close historic ties and
economic interests.
Crimea, part of Russia until 1954, is Ukraine’s only region
with a majority ethnic Russian population, and Russia has a
military presence already with the headquarters of its Black Sea
Fleet.
“Even though the president doesn’t want to view this as a
Cold War scenario, Vladimir Putin does,” U.S. Senator John
McCain, an Arizona Republican and a frequent critic of Obama’s
foreign policy, told Reuters. “The fact that the United States
has appeared weak in the world has encouraged him.”
The Obama administration appears to have few other ready
options to push back.
Current and former U.S. officials insist that Washington and
its European allies, while they have ruled out the use of
military force, can still exert pressure on Moscow by
demonstrating that it has a lot to lose if it continues on its
current course. That could the include the boost to its image
from hosting February’s Winter Olympic Games.
“Putin spent allegedly $50 billion to show off the ‘New
Russia’ at the Sochi Olympics,” said Michael McFaul, who left
his post as U.S. ambassador to Moscow earlier this week. “He has
to understand that all he has hoped for will be swept away if
indeed there’s a genuine military conflict.”
CRISIS MANAGEMENT
The escalating crisis also raises questions about whether
the White House was quick enough to recognize the seriousness of
the Ukraine issue and to give it adequate attention.
U.S. officials and other sources said that the State
Department, particularly the hard-charging assistant secretary
of state for Europe, Victoria Nuland, had for months been
raising alarms about Russia’s more aggressive posture toward
former Soviet states, and Ukraine in particular.
Washington’s engagement accelerated after a November 2013
European summit at which Ukraine – along with Armenia – declined
under heavy Russian pressure to sign association agreements with
the European Union.
“That’s when you saw the Americans stepping up,” said Damon
Wilson, executive vice president of the Washington-based
Atlantic Council, and a former adviser on Europe to President
George W. Bush.
Nuland, he said, “created U.S. policy really out of very
little at the time.”
McFaul said the Ukraine crisis was “on our radar at the
highest levels” from the outset last fall and he personally
acted as a bridge between the White House and State Department.
“It’s important to understand the limitation of what we can
and can’t do, but to say we weren’t paying attention is
incorrect,” the former ambassador, a longtime Obama confidant,
told Reuters by telephone late on Friday.
Wilson praised Obama’s sharper warnings to Russia on
Friday. Now, he said, the United States will have to decide how
deeply broader ties with Russia – already strained by
differences over the Syrian civil war – have been harmed. “At
what point does this disagreement become so significant that it
bleeds over into other issues?”
SEVERE CRISIS, FEW OPTIONS
James Collins, U.S. ambassador to Moscow from 1997-2001,
said that compared with the last major crisis with Russia, its
2008 war with Georgia, “this could be even more severe in terms
of poisoning Russia’s relations with the Europeans and the
United States.”
Obama, who decided to step in front of the cameras at the
White House on Friday after signs of heightened Russian military
activity in Crimea, was vague in his threat of the consequences.
A senior administration official said options being
considered included skipping the Sochi G8 summit in June and
rejecting Russian overtures for deeper trade and commercial
ties. In a statement on Saturday after Obama’s phone call with
Putin, the White House warned that Russia risked “greater
political and economic isolation.”
While it is too early to contemplate economic sanctions,
“there will be a time and a place for punitive action against
Russia if it in fact follows through on what appears to be
happening on the ground in Crimea,” McFaul said.
For the moment, Washington is still talking to Moscow at
high levels. In addition to the Obama-Putin call, U.S. Defense
Secretary Chuck Hagel spoke on Saturday with his Russian
counterpart, the Pentagon said, adding Hagel told Sergei Shoigu
that Moscow’s military intervention risked an escalation that
would threaten European and international security.
Asked whether some U.S. military units had been on alert
over turmoil in Crimea, a U.S. official said there was no change
in the U.S. military’s stance and the U.S. focus was on
diplomatic options.
Obama’s national security team met to discuss policy options
on Saturday, a senior Obama administration official said.
AID TO UKRAINE
Along with troops, Putin has made clear he is prepared to
pour money into Ukraine to pull it closer to Russia’s orbit.
The European Union, United States and International Monetary
Fund are all considering monetary support to Ukraine’s new
government, with promises of much larger IMF help if Ukraine
implements economic reforms after its elections in May.
There is concern in Washington whether funds will be
delivered fast enough to prop up Ukraine’s troubled economy.
Pressure is building on Capitol Hill to accelerate U.S. aid.
Obama also finds himself without a U.S. ambassador in Moscow
at a critical juncture, although the Obama administration
appears to be moving to rectify that.
Though McFaul’s departure had been scheduled for months,
Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, and the State
Department only recently agreed on a candidate to succeed him,
officials said, a sign that an announcement could come soon.
Speculation in Washington is that those under consideration
include three former U.S. ambassadors to Ukraine, John Tefft,
Steven Pifer and Carlos Pascual.
(Additional reporting by Phil Stewart, Steve Holland and Arshad
Mohammed; Editing by Frances Kerry)
