BRUSSELS (AP) — With the smell of war in the air over Europe, world leaders got over the shock of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s order to deploy troops to separatist regions of eastern Ukraine and they are focused on producing as forceful a reaction as possible.
Germany made the first big move, taking steps to halt the process of certifying the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia — a lucrative deal long sought by Moscow, but criticized by the U.S. for increasing Europe’s reliance on Russian energy supplies.
The West insisted Putin’s bold moves in Ukraine violated countless international agreements and since the words of diplomacy had failed, it was time to move towards action.
With Western powers long having made clear that the fate of Ukraine wasn’t worth a hot and direct military confrontation with Russia, and the potential of a world war, sanctions were the only, limited, option to crystalize their anger.
“No lows too low, no lies too blatant, no red lines too red to cross,” Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte said in summing up the political disgust felt from Europe to North America and democracies hugging Russia’s borders in Asia like Japan and South Korea.
However, Putin continued to knock the world off-kilter with a strategy where confusion about the true extent of an invasion, which would automatically kick in major sanctions, remained unclear and debatable.
Russia says it’s sending what it deems “peacekeepers” into eastern Ukraine, but the European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell stressed they were “troops” on sovereign Ukrainian territory.
“I wouldn’t say that’s a fully-fledged invasion, but Russian troops are on Ukrainian soil,” Borrell said.
The latest developments were enough to force the 27-nation bloc into a mode of high alert, and the EU’s foreign ministers would be deciding later Tuesday on how deep a first batch of sanctions would have to cut.
It would likely stop far short of the “massive” package threatened by the EU and Washington for a full military invasion into national territory that Kiev still controls.
“The way we respond will define us for the generations to come,” Simonyte said.
Too much too soon, though, could also hurt the international response, Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer said.
“There is a variety of sanctions options that now need to be used in a targeted way, because we have to assume that we haven’t yet reached the peak of the escalation,” he said.
A conflict could devastate Ukraine and cause huge economic damage across Europe, which is heavily dependent on Russian energy. But Asian nations are also worried.
President Moon Jae-in instructed his officials to prepare for the economic fallout in South Korea if the Ukraine crisis worsens and U.S.-backed nations levy stringent economic sanctions on Russia.
