Finland,Sweden Brush Aside Putin's Warnings,NATO Escalates Weapons to Ukraine
The U.S. deflects Putin’s nuclear alert as another effort at escalation.
A statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry Friday voiced concern about what it described as efforts by the United States and some of its allies to “drag” Finland and Sweden into NATO and warned that Moscow would be forced to take retaliatory measures if they join the alliance.
Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said Saturday that “we’ve heard this before.”
“We don’t think that it calls for a military threat,” Haavisto said in an interview with the Finnish public broadcaster YLE. “Should Finland be NATO’s external border, it rather means that Russia would certainly take that into account in its own defense planning. I don’t see anything new as such” in the statement delivered by Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, Haavisto said.
Finland has a 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) land border with Russia — the longest border shared by any European Union member state and Russia.
Haavisto’s words were echoed by the Finnish President Sauli Niinisto who said on Friday that he didn’t see the statement meaning Moscow was threatening Finland militarily but rather what kind of “countersteps” Russia would take should Finland join NATO.
Niinisto told Finnish media that he didn’t see Zakharova’s statement being any different from what she and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov have said before on Finland’s possible membership in NATO. He also noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the issue with a similar tone already in 2016 during his Finland visit.
In Sweden, Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson addressed Moscow’s statement in a joint news conference Friday with Sweden’s military commander Micael Bryden.
“I want to be extremely clear. It is Sweden that itself and independently decides on our security policy line,” Andersson said.
Russia’s statement came as Moscow’s relations with the West sank to the lowest point since the Cold War over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“It’s obvious that if Finland and Sweden join NATO, which is first of all a military organization, it will entail serious military-political consequences, which would require retaliatory steps by the Russian Federation,” Zakharova said at a news briefing Friday.
Zakharova argued that while every state has a sovereign right to choose ways of ensuring its security, all members of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe confirmed their adherence to the principle that the security of one state shouldn’t be achieved to the detriment of another country’s security.
“We view Finland’s course for maintaining the policy of military non-alignment as an important factor contributing to stability and security in northern Europe and on the European continent as a whole,” Zakharova said, adding that “we can’t fail to see consistent efforts by NATO and some of its members, primarily the U.S., to drag Finland as well as Sweden into the alliance.” She noted an increase of NATO drills on their territories.
Though not members, Finland and Sweden closely cooperate with NATO, allowing, among other things, the alliance’s troops to exercise on their soil. Helsinki and Stockholm have also substantially intensified their bilateral defense cooperation in the past years and secured close military cooperation with the United States, Britain, and neighboring NATO member Norway.
——
Vladimir Isachenkov from Moscow contributed to this report.
___
Follow AP’s coverage of the Ukraine crisis at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
Europe escalates measures against Russia with flight bans and weapons for Ukraine.
EU Nations brush Putin's Nuke Threads aside and Promptly finance the provision of lethal weapons to Ukraine, in what the bloc’s top official called “a watershed moment.”
 |
Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow in 2020.
Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow in 2020.Credit...Maxim Shemetov/Reuters
BRUSSELS — European countries under the banner of the European Union banded together for the first time to finance the provision of lethal weapons to Ukraine, in what the bloc’s top official called “a watershed moment.”
“For the first time ever, the European Union will finance the purchase and delivery of weapons and other equipment to a country that is under attack,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, the E.U.’s executive branch, said Sunday. She spoke ahead of a meeting of E.U. foreign ministers intended to hash out details of a raft of new sanctions and other measures aimed at Russia.
Ms. von der Leyen also announced a total closure of E.U. airspace to Russian aircraft.
The measure, she said, will exclude not just Russian airlines but also Russian-chartered private jets from all 27 member states’ airspaces, practically banning Russians from European skies. A number of countries had started announcing individual airspace closures on Saturday.
The bloc will also take steps to bar RT, the Kremlin-funded global broadcaster, as well as Sputnik, a news agency, from European airwaves, Ms. von der Leyen said.
“We will ban in the E.U. the Kremlin’s media machine,” she said. “The state-owned Russia Today and Sputnik, as well as their subsidiaries will no longer be able to spread their lies to justify Putin’s war and to saw division in our Union.”
Ms. von der Leyen said the bloc would also start developing fresh sanctions against Belarus, which has emerged as the key proxy and assistant for the invasion of Ukraine.
In an unusually emotive statement, Ms. von der Leyen, a German politician and former defense minister who is appointed to her E.U. role, not elected, was effusive in her praise of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and said Ukrainians were welcome to seek refuge in the E.U.
“President Zelensky’s leadership and his bravery, and the resilience of the Ukrainian people are outstanding and impressive,” she said. “They are an inspiration to us all.”
“We welcome with open arms those Ukrainians who have to flee from Putin’s bombs,” she said, “and I am proud of the warm welcome that Europeans have given them.”
 |
Ms. von der Leyen’s announcements still needed to be approved formally and put into effect by the individual E.U. member states, following the normal decision-making structure of the bloc which is a club of sovereign states, not a federation.
A Russian Navy vessel sailing in the Bosporus near Istanbul earlier this month.
A Russian Navy vessel sailing in the Bosporus near Istanbul earlier this month.Credit...Yoruk Isik/Reuters
Turkey will implement a 1936 international treaty that would potentially ban both Ukrainian and Russian warships from passing through the straits connecting the Black Sea to the south, Turkey's top diplomat said on Sunday.
Turkey said it had decided that the invasion of Ukraine and the resulting fighting constituted a war. The word “war” allows Turkey to close the straits to vessels of the countries involved.
“To be honest, we have reached the conclusion that this now turned into war,” Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said in a televised interview on the CNN Turk news network.
Turkey on Sunday described the Russian invasion of Ukraine as “war,” with consecutive tweets and statements from top officials of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Mr. Erdogan had earlier called the invasion a “military operation” of Russia that violated international law.
Ukraine has been appealing to Turkey to stop Russian warships from passing through the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits, which fall under the 1936 Montreux Convention.
Mr. Cavusoglu mentioned in his remarks Sunday that both countries still have the right to move vessels to home bases in the Black Sea.
“There shouldn’t be abuses,” he said. “It shouldn’t join the war after crossing the strait saying that it would go to its base.”
On Saturday, a short time after President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine posted on Twitter indicating that Turkey had banned the Russia passage of warships through the Black Sea, Turkey denied there had been any measures taken.
A Turkish official close to Erdogan who asked to remain anonymous as he is not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, said that Mr. Erdogan did not tell Mr. Zelensky that he had agreed to a ban on the passage of Russian military vessels.
The confusion may have come from a grammar mistake, which is common for Ukrainian speakers, since the language has no articles, and he may have meant to say “a” ban rather than “the” ban in his English language post. Jonathan Weisman
Ukraine War brings up memories of Trump’s earlier impeachment.
Senator Mitt Romney speaking with reporters at the Capitol this month in Washington.
Senator Mitt Romney speaking with reporters at the Capitol this month in Washington.Credit...Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times
Former President Donald J. Trump’s praise of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has rekindled a debate over an all-but-forgotten chapter of Mr. Trump’s presidency: his impeachment in 2019 for withholding military aide to Ukraine to try to force Ukraine’s president to dig up dirt on his Democratic rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
That Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has been praised in recent days for his bravery and leadership, yet only one Republican senator, Mitt Romney of Utah, voted to convict Mr. Trump after his 2020 Senate trial. On Sunday, Mr. Romney said he was sure some of his Republican colleagues would like to forget the incident.
“That was a very sad and awful exchange on the part of our president; this was Zelensky, now a world hero, asking for weapons, and it was an American president slow-walking the provision of those weapons in order to have Zelensky carry out a political investigation on his foe,” Mr. Romney said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “It was wrong. It was in violation of a president’s responsibility to defend our nation and defend the cause of freedom and resulted in his being impeached.”
Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, who has zealously pursued Mr. Trump for his role in fomenting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol from her position on the House’s Jan. 6 committee, voted against that first impeachment. On CBS’s “Face The Nation,” she said she did not regret that vote because Democrats were not diligent enough in gathering hard evidence to support it.
“You’ll see with the Jan. 6 committee, we have a very aggressive litigation strategy,” she said, “and I think there were a number of instances in the first impeachment where it would have been important and decisive to have witnesses testify who did not come in and testify.”
But other Republicans simply refused to talk about Mr. Trump and Ukraine.
“If you want to know what Donald Trump thinks about Vladimir Putin or any other topic, I’d encourage you to invite him on your show,” Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, said on ABC’s “This Week.” “I don’t speak on behalf of other politicians. They can speak for themselves.”
One Republican who did offer a view on Mr. Putin was Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who suggested that the Russian president may be taking leave of his senses.
Mr. Putin “appears to have some neurophysiological health issues,” Mr. Rubio said on CNN, “but most telling is, this is a man who has long prided himself on emotional control. His recent flashes of anger are very uncharacteristic and show erosion in impulse control.”
A Rosneft oil facility near Krasnoyarsk, Russia.
A Rosneft oil facility near Krasnoyarsk, Russia.Credit...Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters
The British oil company BP said on Sunday that it would “exit” its nearly 20 percent stake in Rosneft, the Russian state-controlled oil company. BP also said that both its chief executive, Bernard Looney, and his predecessor, Bob Dudley, would resign their seats on the Rosneft board.
The London-based oil giant has worked in Russia for over 30 years, but the invasion of Ukraine led the company to conclude that its involvement with Rosneft “simply cannot continue,” BP’s chairman, Helge Lund, said in a statement on Sunday.
BP came under pressure in recent days from both the British government and opposition lawmakers over the Rosneft stake. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has taken a hard line against the Russian invasion, arguing strongly that Europe needs to rapidly reduce its dependence on imports of natural gas from Russia.
In these circumstances, BP’s large holding in Rosneft looked increasingly untenable.
It was not clear how BP would accomplish its exit from Rosneft. A BP spokeswoman said that the company would begin the process of disposing of its stake, but did not yet know how it would accomplish that. The market for Rosneft shares is unlikely to be strong at the moment, although the company is one of the world’s largest oil producers.
The board resignations will lead to accounting changes at BP. The company will no longer book its share of Rosneft’s profits ($2.4 billion last year) and reserves (about 50 percent of BP’s holdings). BP received $600 million in dividends from Rosneft last year, and would have been expected to receive more this year because of higher oil prices.
BP also said that it would write off at least $11 billion in the first quarter of 2022 related to the Rosneft holding.
BP’s exit from Rosneft, once accomplished, will draw at least a temporary line on BP’s long experiment with Russia, which began early this century with the company forming a joint venture called TNK-BP with a group of Russian oligarchs.
After a decade of stormy relations among the partners, BP sold its stake in the joint venture to Rosneft in 2013 for $12.5 billion in cash plus the 19.75 percent stake Rosneft.
Rick Gladstone
A missile hit the site of a radioactive waste disposal facility in Ukraine’s besieged capital Kyiv overnight but there were no reports of damage or any indication of radioactive release, the head of the United Nations nuclear monitor, Rafael M. Grossi, said Sunday. Mr. Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Ukrainian officials had informed him of the missile strike and their assessment, which was continuing. The strike came a day after Ukrainian officials reported damage at an electrical transformer at a similar nuclear waste disposal facility near Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city. Both Kyiv and Kharkiv have been under assault since Russia’s invasion forces entered the country on Thursday. “These two incidents highlight the very real risk that facilities with radioactive material will suffer damage during the conflict, with potentially severe consequences for human health and the environment,” Mr. Grossi said.
Valerie HopkinsReporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
President Volodymyr Zelensky said he received “assurances” from his Belarussian counterpart that “missiles, planes and helicopters” would not fly to Ukraine from Belarus ahead of negotiations that will take place on the border between the two countries.
“I will say frankly that I do not really believe in the outcome of this meeting, but let them try to make sure that no citizen of Ukraine has any doubt that I, as a president, did not try to stop the war.”
David E. Sanger
U.S. deflects Putin’s nuclear alert as another effort at escalation.
A White House military aide boarding Marine One with the “nuclear football” that followed President Biden to Delaware on Friday.
A White House military aide boarding Marine One with the “nuclear football” that followed President Biden to Delaware on Friday.Credit...Leah Millis/Reuters
The White House avoided a heated response to President Vladimir V. Putin’s announcement that he was putting Russia’s nuclear forces on alert, casting it as another example of Mr. Putin’s moves to imagine a threat and escalate the confrontation with the West.
Officials were still debating whether to alter the status of American nuclear forces. But for now, according to two government officials, they were trying to avoid being lured into a spiral of escalation, taking the position that American nuclear forces are on a constant low level of alert that is sufficient to deter Russian use of nuclear weapons.
Comments