WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – President Barack Obama warned Russia yesterday that military intervention in Ukraine would lead to “costs,” as tension with old foe President Vladimir Putin rose in a Cold War-style crisis.
“We are now deeply concerned by reports of military movements taken by the Russian Federation inside of Ukraine,” he told reporters. Obama and European leaders would consider skipping a G8 summit this summer in the Russian city of Sochi if Moscow intervenes militarily in Ukraine, a senior U.S. official said. The G8 includes the world’s seven leading industrial nations and Russia.
“The United States will stand with the international community in affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine,” Obama said in the White House briefing room.
Facing yet another confrontation with Putin after butting heads with him over Syria, Obama said any violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity would be “deeply destabilizing.”
Obama did not spell out what he meant by Russian military intervention.
The chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, Republican Mike Rogers, said in a statement: “It appears that the Russian military now controls the Crimean peninsula.”
The crisis has presented Obama with a difficult challenge days after widespread demonstrations by pro-Western protesters prompted Viktor Yanukovich, Ukraine’s pro-Moscow president, to flee to Russia.
Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine now at the Brookings Institution think tank, said it was inconceivable that the United States would consider a military response were Russia to seek to gain control of Crimea, and that it had few plausible options to oppose such a move.
“If you look at the U.S.-Russian relationship, what kinds of things could we do to punish them? There are not a lot of good levers there,” he added.
Putin has proved immune to U.S. calls for Moscow to stop supporting Syria’s government in its three-year-old civil war. And the United States was unable to prevent Putin from staging Russian incursions into neighboring Georgia in 2008.