President Putin raised the spectre of a new Russian puppet state inside Europe yesterday when he called for immediate talks on “statehood” for southeast Ukraine.
His remarks came days after he compared the government in Kiev to the Nazis and warned the West “not to mess with us”. Mr Putin has also started referring to the Donbass region as “Novorossiya”, a reference to its Tsarist-era past as a province of Russia.
Pro-Russian rebels in southeast Ukraine have been fighting Kiev for almost five months and last week achieved a string of successes.
The victories have come as a result of what Nato called “more and more overt” Russian military support, including the deployment of more than 1,000 troops with heavy weaponry and armoured vehicles.
The separatists fired yesterday on a Ukrainian naval vessel in the Azov Sea, in the first naval attack of the conflict. A rescue mission was under way last night, the Ukrainian military said. Ukrainian troops and residents are meanwhile reinforcing the port of Mariupol, the next big city in the path of the pro-Russian fighters.
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The rebels were accused of killing hundreds of Ukrainian fighters on Saturday. Paramilitaries who escaped said that dozens of their comrades had been taken prisoner when insurgents reneged on a deal to let them withdraw peacefully from the besieged town of Ilovaysk.
The Crimea Battalion, one of several privately funded units involved in much of the most intense combat, said on its Facebook page: “There was no kind of corridor at all. They started shooting at the column. We broke through two encirclements to get out.”
The Kremlin continues to deny that it has sent troops or military equipment to support the insurgency.
The Russian president said on state television that talks should be held immediately between Kiev and the rebels to end the bloodshed. These should focus “not just on technical issues but on the political organisation of society and statehood in southeastern Ukraine”, he said. Moscow could not stand aside while people were being shot “almost at point blank”.
The Kremlin said yesterday that Mr Putin’s use of the word “statehood” was not an endorsement of rebel independence. His spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, when asked whether Novorossiya, or “New Russia”, should still be part of Ukraine, replied: “Of course.”
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European Union leaders agreed on Saturday to prepare new economic sanctions against Moscow by the end of this week. The United States is also planning to tighten its sanctions. Robert Menendez, head of the US senate foreign relations committee, accused Russia yesterday of an invasion.
Russia has never formally endorsed the rebels’ demands for independence in east Ukraine. Mr Putin’s words have nonetheless set alarm bells ringing across Europe, holding out the threat of an equivalent to Transnistria, Abkhazia or South Ossetia, other “frozen conflicts” exploited by Moscow to exert influence over Moldova and Georgia.
Andrei Purgin, deputy leader of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic, said last night that he would join talks between an established “contact group” of representatives from Moscow, Kiev and the rebels today in Minsk, the Belarus capital.