Press TV – March 9, 2014
The US says it will not recognize “the annexation of Crimea by Russia” even if residents of the autonomous region vote to separate from Ukraine in a planned referendum next week.
The Crimean parliament has already voted to join Russia. They also voted to hold a referendum on 16 March to validate the decision. A Yes-vote would most likely further heighten the existing tensions in the already divided nation. The region has an ethnic Russian majority.
A top US national security official Tony Blinken said on Sunday that “First, if there is an annexation of Crimea, a referendum that moves Crimea from Ukraine to Russia, we won’t recognize it, nor will most of the world.”
Blinken, who is US President Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser, told CNN that “Second, the pressure that we’ve already exerted in coordination with our partners and allies will go up. The president made it very clear in announcing our sanctions, as did the Europeans the other day that this is the first step and we’ve put in place a very flexible and very tough mechanism to increase the pressure, to increase the sanctions.”
Blinken was echoing a similar position made by Obama on Thursday that the US would not accept any referendum on the future status of Crimea unless passed with the approval of the interim government in Kiev adding that the proposed referendum would be “unconstitutional” and in violation of “international law.”
Obama is set to meet with Ukraine’s interim Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, in Washington on Wednesday. The meeting is seen as a show of support amid a tense stand-off with Russia over the status of Crimea.
Russia has declared its support for Ukraine’s secession movement. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov Crimea has the right to self-determination while the Speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament, Valentina Matvienko, said on Friday that Crimea would be welcomed as “an absolutely equal subject of the Russian Federation if a referendum on March 16 was in favor of the move.”
Moscow has also warned against “hasty and reckless steps” that could harm Russian-American relations.