Obama: ‘No Business As Usual’ With Russia Until Ukraine Peace Deal Implemented
Source: RFE/RL
U.S. President Barack Obama said there can be “no business as usual” with Russia until it “fully implements” the agreement aimed at ending the war between Kyiv’s forces and Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Speaking July 9 at a news conference in Warsaw, where he was participating in a NATO summit, Obama cited Russian aggression in Ukraine as one of an unprecedented range of security, humanitarian, and political challenges the alliance faces.
“This is a pivotal moment for our alliance,” Obama said, adding that Washington’s commitment to “the security and defense of Europe” is “unwavering."
"In good times, and in bad, Europe can count on the United States. Always," he added. Referring to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and its backing for armed separatists in eastern Ukraine, Obama said that Moscow has violated the sovereignty and territorial integrity of an independent European nation, Ukraine, and engaged in provocative behavior toward NATO allies.
Read more: http://www.rferl.org/content/obama-no-business-as-usual-with-russia/27849254.html
Meanwhile in occupied Ukraine...
Special Report: Crimea Tatars endure second tragedy under Russian rule
The knock on the door came at 7.30am and the brutal interrogation lasted for almost eight hours. After being taken from his home in Crimea to a police station, Weldar Shukurdiyev was threatened and assaulted.
“Two men were beating me,” he remembered. “There were constant threats: they said they would make me eat the Ukrainian flag. Every five minutes somebody would enter and shout more insults.”
Mr Shukurdiyev is a Crimean Tatar, one of the original inhabitants of the Black Sea peninsula. Two years after Russia seized their historic homeland from Ukraine, the Tatars are now the target of an escalating campaign of repression mounted by their new overlords.
The suspicion of them is based on a painful truth: no-one has a more viscerally powerful reason to oppose the return of Russian rule over Crimea than the Tatars. Like most of his brethren, Mr Shukurdiyev was born not in Crimea, but in what was then the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan.
...
But the reprieve lasted only 23 years before Russia returned and Crimea was, in Vladimir Putin’s triumphant phrase, “reunited with the Motherland”.
Since then, more and more Tatars have fled a climate of fear and repression in Crimea, seeking safety elsewhere in Ukraine. A people who endured mass deportation 72 years ago are now suffering a slow-motion – and less cruel - version of the same phenomenon.
How many Tatars have fled Crimea since Mr Putin reclaimed the territory in March 2014 is unclear. In all, as many as 100,000 people have left the region for the rest of Ukraine, according to SOS Crimea, a Kiev-based charity.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/07/special-report-crimea-tatars-endure-second-tragedy-under-russian/
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