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- Biden calls Russia’s moves an invasion
- Australia and Japan on Wednesday imposed their own punishments
The New York Times
WASHINGTON
EnergiesNet.com 02 23 2022
Russia faced mounting pressure and economic sanctions on Wednesday over the Ukraine crisis, as the United States and allies coordinated punishments and denounced the beginning of an “invasion of Ukraine.”
After the United States and others imposed penalties, Australia, Canada and Japan joined in similar efforts to thwart the Kremlin’s advances, with Western officials confirming that Russian forces had begun crossing the Ukrainian border. In less than a day, nations have halted a key natural gas pipeline for Russia, limited its access to global financing and hampered the country’s elite.
With their condemnations, global leaders sent the same message: Russia was violating international law and the sovereignty of Ukraine.
“Australians always stand up to bullies, and we will be standing up to Russia,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia said while announcing sanctions on Wednesday.
In rolling out penalties, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada called Russia’s actions “a threat to the security and stability of the region and the international rules-based order.”
The global response began early on Tuesday, just hours after President Vladimir V. Putin recognized the self-declared separatist states in eastern Ukraine and Russian forces started rolling into their territory, according to NATO, European Union and White House officials. It was the first major deployment of Russian troops across the internationally recognized border since the current crisis began.
As Russian has ramped up its military preparations, President Biden has been resolute that Mr. Putin will face severe consequences for his actions, which Russian state media has portrayed as a rightful response to American aggression.
“Who in the Lord’s name does Putin think gives him the right to declare new so-called countries on territory that belonged to his neighbors?” Mr. Biden said on Tuesday.
Mr. Biden warned Mr. Putin that more penalties would follow if the Russian leader did not withdraw his forces and engage in diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis.
But that prospect is growing increasingly dim, as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken canceled plans to meet with the Russian foreign minister on Thursday, saying that it does not “make sense” to hold talks while Russian forces are on the move.
“To put it simply, Russia just announced that it is carving out a big chunk of Ukraine,” Mr. Biden said, adding, “He’s setting up a rationale to take more territory by force.”
— Michael D. Shear, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Anton Troianovski and Austin Ramzy
Russian messaging puts the rationale for invasion in place, piece by piece
Slumped in a chair, red tie askew, his staccato delivery emphasizing every grievance, President Vladimir V. Putin delivered a speech on Monday that sounded like a call to war.
It was also the culmination of a propaganda barrage orchestrated by the Russian state news media in recent days — a stark demonstration of how the Kremlin can use its dominance of the airwaves to lay the groundwork for a political decision that could cause widespread pain.
By Tuesday afternoon, Russia’s stock market had fallen again, leaving it down 20 percent in less than a week, as businesses braced for damaging new Western sanctions. And the potentially far more tragic costs if Mr. Putin were to go ahead with an invasion of Ukraine still appeared incalculable.
But to the millions of Russians watching television, the narrative of the last days has been completely different. Booms and flashes of artillery fire. Blurred-out footage of human remains. Women and children, crying and fleeing. A separatist appeal to the president. An emergency meeting of Mr. Putin’s Security Council. A dramatic address to the nation.
And what happens next is a mystery.
For months, as Washington warned of a looming Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s powerful propaganda machine dismissed and parodied talk of war.
Will Biden’s sanctions hold Putin back?
(Al Drago for The NyTimes)
When the Obama administration imposed sanctions on Russia for invading Ukraine in 2014, American officials were hopeful they would deter President Vladimir V. Putin from further aggression.
Some of the officials argue today that the sanctions prevented Mr. Putin from ordering Russian forces beyond where they had halted on the Crimean Peninsula and in the eastern Donbas region. But Mr. Putin held on to Crimea. And on Monday, he ordered more troops into an insurgent-controlled area of eastern Ukraine where thousands of Russian soldiers have been operating and said the Kremlin was recognizing two enclaves as independent states.
Now, President Biden, who as vice president helped oversee Ukraine policy in 2014, has to weigh what sanctions might compel Mr. Putin to halt his new offensive, which the White House has judged to be an “invasion.” The White House is taking a step-by-step approach, trying to calibrate each tranche of measures to Mr. Putin’s actions.
“I’m going to begin to impose sanctions in response, far beyond the steps we and our allies and partners implemented in 2014,” Mr. Biden said on Tuesday in announcing a new set of sanctions. “And if Russia goes further with this invasion, we stand prepared to go further.”
While American officials have studied the effects of sanctions imposed since 2014 and sharpened techniques, Mr. Putin has had years to make his country’s $1.5 trillion economy more insular so that parts of Russia would be shielded from tough penalties. Speaking to reporters on Friday, he boasted that his country had grown more self-sufficient in the face of “illegitimate” Western sanctions, according to Russia’s Tass news service. He added that in the future, it would be “important for us to raise the level of our economic sovereignty.”
And perhaps most notably, Mr. Putin and his closest aides and partners in Moscow might not suffer much themselves from sanctions, analysts say.
Mr. Putin’s decision on Monday to press ahead with the troop movement suggests that he has concluded that the costs of new sanctions are tolerable, despite U.S. talk of “massive consequences” for his country. Several of his top aides made that point in choreographed speeches to him in a meeting of his Security Council on Monday in Moscow.
If Russian officials are firm in that mind-set, the Biden administration might find it has to impose the absolute harshest sanctions — ones that would inflict suffering on many ordinary citizens — or look for a noneconomic option, such as giving greater military aid to an insurgency in Ukraine. Mr. Biden has said he will not send American troops to defend Ukraine.
— Edward Wong and Michael Crowley
nytimes.com 02 23 2022
