Russian leader says Ukraine’s Poroshenko is trying to bolster popularity with Black Sea ‘provocation’

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Vladimir Putin has shrugged off Donald Trump’s threat to cancel a meeting with him due to Moscow’s seizure of three Ukrainian navy ships, and accused Ukraine’s president of orchestrating the crisis.

Russia seized three Ukrainian naval vessels and their crews on Sunday over what it said was their illegal entry into Russian waters, which Ukraine has denied.

The episode has raised fears in the west of a wider conflict between the two countries, and Trump said on Tuesday that he may cancel a planned meeting with Putin at the G20 summit in Argentina later this week as a response to “aggression”.

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But Putin, in his first public comments on the Black Sea incident, said the Ukrainian vessels had clearly been in the wrong, dismissed the clash as a minor border issue, and accused Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, of having orchestrated the crisis in order to boost his dire ratings.

Putin said he still hoped to meet Trump at the G20 on Friday, while the Kremlin said the meeting was still being prepared and Washington had not informed Moscow it was off.

“It was without doubt a provocation,” Putin said. “It was organised by the president ahead of the elections. The president is in fifth place ratings-wise and therefore had to do something. It was used as a pretext to introduce martial law.”

The Russian president, speaking at a financial forum in Moscow in his first extensive remarks since the confrontation on Sunday, said the west was ready to forgive Ukrainian politicians their shortcomings because it bought into the anti-Russian narrative that Kiev was promoting.

No decision had been made on Trump’s meeting with Putin, White House officials said on Wednesday.

The US defence secretary, Jim Mattis, said Russia’s action shows it could not be counted on to keep its word.

“It was obviously a flagrant violation of international law. It was, I think, a cavalier use of a force that injured Ukrainian sailors,” he said.

Poroshenko, after warning of the threat of “full-scale war” on Wednesday, signed an act imposing martial law for 30 days in regions bordering Russia, the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. He donned a camouflaged uniform as he toured a military training centre. “It’s important to keep our powder dry and be ready at any moment to push back the aggressor,” Poroshenko said.

Western governments have rallied behind Kiev, accusing Russia of illegally blocking access to the Sea of Azov, used by both countries, and of using force without justification.

Sunday’s incident was the first direct confrontation between Ukraine and Russia in the long-running conflict pitting Kiev against Moscow and Russian-backed separatists in the country’s east. It has raised fears of a wider escalation in a conflict that has killed more than 10,000 people since 2014.

It has emerged that Russia has been sending more of its advanced S-400 surface-to-air missile systems to Crimea amid the rising tensions.

Vadim Astafyev, a spokesman for Russia’s southern military district, was cited by Russian news agencies as saying that a new battalion of S-400 missiles would be delivered to Crimea soon and become operational by the end of the year.

The deployment is likely to have been long planned, but the timing of the announcement appeared designed to send a message to Ukraine and the west that Russia was serious about defending what it regards as its own territory and waters.

The Kremlin has steadily poured new military hardware into Crimea since it annexed the peninsula from Ukraine in 2014, turning it into what state-backed media have called a fortress.

Crimea hosts three battalions of the anti-aircraft missile systems with a range of up to 250 miles (400km), allowing Russia to control swathes of the skies above the Black Sea. The new deployment would allow it to increase its air defence coverage area.

A Reuters correspondent in Crimea on Wednesday observed a Russian navy minesweeper ship, the Vice-Admiral Zakharin, heading for the Sea of Azov, which is used by Ukraine and Russia and is a source of growing tension.

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A Crimean court was due to order the detention of nine of the 24 captured Ukrainian sailors, including senior Ukrainian naval officers and at least one member of Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency.

This week a court in Simferopol, the capital of Crimea, ordered the other 15 Ukrainian sailors to be detained for two months pending a possible trial.

All of the sailors could face prison sentences of up to six years if found guilty of what Moscow said was a plot to illegally cross the Russian border by trying to pass through the Russian-controlled Kerch Strait on Sunday without notice and ignoring calls to stop.

Ukraine said its ships had done nothing wrong and have every right to use the strait, the only gateway to the Sea of Azov from the Black Sea, without Russian permission.