By David Herszenhorn
A Ukrainian Navy officer looks at a scuttled Russian vessel blocking the channel to the Black Sea outside the town of Myrnyi, in western Crimea.Credit: AP
Simferopol: President Barack Obama urged Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday to accept the terms of a potential diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis in a phone call that lasted an hour.
In their second phone conversation in the past six days, Mr Obama emphasised to Mr Putin that Russia's incursion into Ukraine was a violation of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, the White House said.
During the call, Mr Obama outlined the terms of a diplomatic "off-ramp" that US officials are promoting.
Under the terms of the deal, Russia would pull back troops to bases in Crimea, allow international monitors in to ensure the rights of ethnic Russians are respected and consent to direct talks with Ukraine officials.
"President Obama indicated that there is a way to resolve the situation diplomatically," the White House said.
While diplomats raced from meeting to meeting in an effort to end the standoff, European leaders signalled they may join US sanctions and Moscow threatened countermeasures as an already jittery situation was made edgier by the opening of new Russian military drills.
The pro-Russian regional parliament in Crimea crossed another red line set by the United States and Europe by voting to hold a referendum on whether to secede from Ukraine and become part of Russia. It scheduled the vote for March 16, hoping to win popular approval for the Russian military seizure of the region. Authorities in the Ukrainian capital Kiev denounced the move.
"Any discussion about the future of Ukraine must include the legitimate government of Ukraine," Mr Obama said in his only public remarks on the crisis Thursday. "In 2014, we are well beyond the days when borders can be redrawn over the heads of democratic leaders."
European Union leaders issued a statement in Brussels calling an annexation referendum "contrary to the Ukrainian Constitution and therefore illegal".
The sanctions Mr Obama approved on Thursday imposed visa bans on officials and other individuals deemed responsible for undermining Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity. The administration would not disclose the names or number of people penalised, but a senior official said privately that it would affect about a dozen people, mostly Russian but some Ukrainian.
Mr Obama also signed an executive order laying out a framework for tougher measures like freezing assets of individuals and institutions.
But the administration held back applying those measures while officials gathered evidence in the hope that waiting would provide some space for Russia to reverse course. The US House of Representatives, in the meantime, approved an economic aid package for the Kiev government and advanced its own sanctions resolution.
Moscow suggested that it would reciprocate with measures seizing US property in Russia.
"The US has the right, and we have the right to respond to it," Vladimir Lukin, a Russian envoy who has worked on the Ukraine crisis, told the Russian news agency Interfax. "But all that is, of course, not making me happy."
The European Union took a step toward more serious measures by suspending talks with Moscow on a wide ranging political-economic pact and on liberalising visa requirements to make it easier for Russians to travel to Europe. European leaders laid out a three-stage process that, in the absence of progress, would next move to travel bans, asset seizures and the cancellation of a planned EU-Russia summit meeting and eventually to broader economic measures.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has been reluctant to move quickly toward sanctions, said the EU was looking for concrete evidence that Russia was trying to calm the situation "in the next few days".
"We made it very clear that we are absolutely willing to achieve matters by negotiation," she said. "We also say, however, that we are ready and willing, if these hopes were to be dashed and looking at what happened on Crimea, to adopt sanctions."
US Secretary of State John Kerry met in Rome with counterparts from Germany, France, Italy and Britain, and expressed support for a push by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius to establish a "contact group" seeking a peaceful resolution of the crisis. The group would include Russia, Ukraine, Britain, France and the United States and serve as a way to bring Moscow and Kiev to the table.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, meeting with Mr Kerry for a second day, expressed irritation at talk of sanctions and other retaliation.
"There are many one-sided, half-hysterical evaluations in the media," he said. "I repeated this to John Kerry, who seems to understand that it doesn't really help the flow of normal work. It's impossible to work honestly under the threat of ultimatums and sanctions."
Ukraine's acting president, Oleksandr Turchynov, scoffed at plans for a Crimea referendum under the watch of foreign troops.
"This will be a farce," he said in a televised address. "This will be false. This will be a crime against the state."
Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Mr Putin, said the Kremlin had been informed of the developments but offered no further comment. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Russia would simplify procedures for people who have lived in Russia or the former Soviet Union to secure Russian citizenship.
If the referendum is held and most Crimeans opt to join Russia, it could create a thorny problem for the United States and European countries that typically support self-determination but oppose independence for regions in their own borders, like Scotland or Catalonia. Russia points to the example of Kosovo, which was welcomed by the West as an independent nation without support from Serbia's central government.
New York Times, Reuters