Excerpt
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): For more on what’s happening on the ground in Ukraine, I’m joined by Andrew Kramer of The New York Times. He joins us from Donetsk.
So, Andrew, you were visiting a town where the Russian troops were streaming in. Describe that scene to us.
ANDREW KRAMER, The New York Times: Yes, this was in the town of Novoazovsk on the Azov Sea. And we were standing on the outside of the town speaking with Ukrainian soldiers who were retreating.
These soldiers were convinced they were fighting the Russians. At least many of them were. We didn’t see the troops coming in, but they were said to have come across the border from Russia into Ukraine. It was a very chaotic scene. And, in fact, a day later, that town was seized by the pro-Russian forces.
HARI SREENIVASAN: You also spoke of locals in that area. What did they think about what’s happening?
ANDREW KRAMER: Well, people here who support the Russian cause are obviously cheered by this development. The rebel organization had been on its last legs militarily in recent weeks.
The Ukrainian army was closing in on towns of Donetsk and Luhansk. And now there’s been a reversal of fortunes, a turning of the tide here. The separatists and, according to Ukrainian government, with the support of Russia, has moved across the Russian border and has now opened a new front in the south along the seashore with the cities of Novoazovsk and Mariupol as the objectives.
Now, a rebel commander I spoke with said the intention is to form a defensive triangle out of these two cities and Donetsk and hopefully force the Ukrainian government into settlement talks on more favorable terms.
"Sanctions ‘only pressure point the West has’ in Ukraine-Russia crisis" PBS NewsHour 8/30/2014
Excerpts
SUMMARY: For more perspective about what options the United States and its Western allies have to deal with the Russian military intervention in Ukraine, Nicholas Burns joins Hari Sreenivasan via Skype from Massachusetts. Burns is a former Under Secretary of State and now a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
----
HARI SREENIVASAN: And what about this idea of Novorossiya, something that the Russians have said, ‘Sure, we’ll stop all of this if we can just go ahead and annex this portion of Ukraine back?’ It seems that whether we like it or not, they’ve already sent the troops in and are, in fact, taking over that part of Ukraine.
R. NICHOLAS BURNS: Well, it’s a very unsettling and destabilizing concept that you’d say that, ‘We have a right as Russians to unite all Russians outside the borders of Russia.’ There are significant populations of Russians, of course, in Ukraine, but also in Moldova, in Belarus, in Kazakhstan, in Uzbekistan.
Should we support the Russian government’s right to march into those countries, take over portions of those countries simply because ethnic Russians are living there? This is an inexact comparison, of course, but that was essentially the philosophy of the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s, that they would unite the Germans living outside the German Reich.
It’s a very dangerous, destabilizing concept we vowed after the second World War we would not allow that kind of action in Europe. And here it is with President Putin, with this Novorossiya, New Russia concept, which is dangerous. And it needs to be opposed by the United States and the Western Europeans.
No comments:
Post a Comment