Western countries on Tuesday promised heavy sanctions against Russia after the recognition of separatist regions in Ukraine where Moscow intends to deploy soldiers, Berlin already announcing the suspension of a gas pipeline expensive to the Kremlin.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on his allies to strike hard and indicated that he was considering breaking diplomatic relations with Moscow, which he accuses of wanting to continue its “military aggression”.
In Moscow, President Vladimir Putin denied wanting to “reconstitute an empire” and the Kremlin assured that he remained “open” to diplomacy, while international criticism has been raining since Monday and Kiev has accused him of want to “resuscitate the USSR”.
Deaf to these accusations, the Russian Parliament approved as a single man on Tuesday the agreements signed the day before by Mr. Putin with the Ukrainian separatists of the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, who have been fighting the forces of Kiev since 2014.
During the night of Monday to Tuesday, Mr. Putin also ordered his army to deploy in these secessionist “republics”, at the risk of aggravating a conflict which has already killed more than 14,000 people.
No timetable or scale for this deployment has been announced, but Russia has more than 150,000 troops, according to Washington, on the Ukrainian borders, an armada likely to lead an invasion.
“Massive” penalties
From the United States to the European Union via NATO, the Russian decision has been widely condemned by the Western camp.
Faced with the amputation of his territory, Mr. Zelensky demanded, more than words, to punish this “new act of Russian aggression”, with in particular “the total stoppage” of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project which is to carry Russian gas in Germany.
Shortly after, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced the “suspension” of the authorization process for this expensive gas pipeline in Moscow, adding that other measures could follow.
He also assured that the EU would take “massive and robust” sanctions. They could target Russian banks and access to European markets.
In Washington, Joe Biden issued an executive order on Monday prohibiting any transaction by Americans with separatist regions, a minimum package. The White House promised “new sanctions” for Tuesday.
In addition to the scale of the Russian deployment, a crucial question will be that of the borders of the separatist “republics”: the current front line or the limits of the administrative regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, defined by Kiev, which are much larger, as claimed by the secessionists.
Russian officials remained unclear.
“Resurrecting the USSR”
Already, in the streets of Kiev, the recognition by Moscow of the separatist regions is arousing fear of a runaway.
“I’m really in shock, because I have a lot of family” in eastern Ukraine, 22-year-old Artem Ivaschenko, from Donetsk, told AFP. “I have lived in Kiev for eight years” and “this is the most terrifying news in eight years”, he adds.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiï Reznikov warned on Tuesday that “difficult trials” awaited Ukraine, with “losses” and “pain”.
He further accused the Kremlin of seeking to “resurrect the USSR”, of which Ukraine was a member until its collapse in 1991.
Faced with this major crisis, the UN Security Council met urgently overnight from Monday to Tuesday and Western and Russian representatives clashed there.
“The next few hours and days will be critical. The risk of major conflict is real,” UN Deputy Secretary General Rosemary DiCarlo said at the meeting.
The shells are falling
On Monday, Mr. Putin strongly criticized the West and called on Ukraine to cease its “military operations” or to assume the continuation of “bloodshed”, statements widely understood as a threat.
On the Ukrainian front line, where the exchange of fire had exploded in recent days, the situation seemed calmer in the morning.
In Shchastia, a small town in the east near the separatist areas, residents were cleaning up the damage from shells that fell the previous night on a residential area on Tuesday.
Valentyna Chmatkova, 59, was sleeping when the projectiles fell, blowing the windows of her one-bedroom apartment. ” We did not expect that. We did not think that Ukraine and Russia would not come to an agreement in the end,” she laments.
“I thought there would be no conflict,” she continues. “I thought our president (Zelensky) and the Russian president were smart and careful.”