Donetsk, Ukraine (CNN) — There are echoes of the Cold War as pro-Russian rebels battle Ukrainian government forces in the nation’s east.
With the new sanctions announced by the European Union and United States against Russia this week, the stakes are getting higher and Moscow is getting more isolated.
“The major sanctions we’re announcing today will continue to ratchet up the pressure on Russia, including the cronies and companies supporting Russia’s illegal activities in the Ukraine,” U.S. President Barack Obama said from the White House South Lawn on Tuesday.
“In other words, today Russia is once again isolating itself from the international community, setting back decades of genuine progress.”
The new and harder-hitting sanctions show the West’s waning patience with Russia over its disputed annexation of Crimea, its support of pro-Russian rebels and the impact of the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which had many Europeans among the 298 people on board when it went down over eastern Ukraine.
Some of the new EU sanctions target eight “cronies” of Putin and three “entities” by limiting their access to EU capital markets, an EU official said on condition of anonymity. The people and entities will be named Wednesday, the official said.
Three state-owned banks named Tuesday by Washington means five of the top six financial institutions in Russia were on the sanctions list, according to a senior Obama administration official.
On Wednesday, international investigators and observers will try for a fourth straight day to reach the site of the MH17 crash.
The Dutch Justice Ministry said its team was unable to leave the city of Donetsk on Tuesday because of violence.
The 50-strong team of Dutch and Australian experts, accompanied by monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, was also forced to abandon its attempts to reach the site Sunday and Monday.
Dutch investigators have yet to lay eyes on the wreckage or the human remains believed still to be strewn across the huge debris field near the town of Torez.
U.S. and Ukrainian officials have said that a Russian-made missile system was used to shoot down MH17 from rebel territory. Russia and the rebels have disputed the allegations and blamed Ukraine for the crash.
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte asked Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in a phone call Tuesday morning to halt the fighting around the crash site so that investigators can access it, Rutte spokesman Jean Fransman said.
While heavy fighting has so far blocked investigators from getting to the crash site, it didn’t stop the determined parents of one of the victims.
George and Angela Dyczynski braved the regional conflict and saw the wreckage firsthand over the weekend.
“We have been always protected,” George Dyczynski said. “I believe it was divine guidance.”
“We really, really promised our daughter that we will go there and that we tried to really fulfill our promises,” said Angela Dyczynski.
Despite no known survivors, the couple holds out hope that their daughter Fatima, a 25-year-old aerospace engineer, is still alive.
“Fatima can only be pronounced dead when the DNA is matched with her body,” Angela Dyczynski said. “So if anybody says at the moment she is dead … it’s not correct.”
Up to this point, very few of the bodies recovered from the crash have been identified by Dutch authorities.
As of Monday, 227 coffins had been sent to the Netherlands, where forensic investigators are working to identify victims. It is unclear how many complete sets of bodies the coffins contain.
The United States and others say Russia has provided arms to rebels in eastern Ukraine, including heavy weapons such as a missile system like the one believed used to down the Malaysian airliner 12 days ago.
Despite previous sanctions, the flow of weapons continues and on Tuesday the fighting appeared to have entered a dangerous new phase. There were reports that Ukraine’s government in the past 48 hours used short-range ballistic missiles against the rebels, three U.S. officials told CNN.
The weapons have a range of about 50 miles (80 kilometers) and pack up to 1,000-pound (454-kilogram) warheads. If the reports are accurate, they are the most deadly missiles used in the conflict to date.
The U.S. officials did not specify where the missiles hit or what damage they caused.
One U.S. official said there has been no reaction from Russia so far.
Another of the U.S. officials said using the missiles is “an escalation, but Ukraine has a right to defend itself.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin acknowledged that his country’s military has short-range missiles, but denied that the military fired any.
In a joint news conference with Klimkin, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry praised Ukrainian officials for proposing a peace plan that includes “serious and substantive dialogue with the Russian-backed separatists.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on its website that a Russian checkpoint had come under fire from Ukrainian forces.
It says Ukrainian officers used automatic weapons and grenades at the Gukovo customs checkpoint, causing damage.
On Tuesday, Klimkin, the Ukrainian foreign minister, denied that Ukrainian forces had fired into Russia.
The defense minister for the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic, Igor Strelkov, said that there had been “extremely severe” battles between his rebel forces and the Ukrainian military in the area of Shaktarsk and Torez.
He said a number of injured rebel fighters, as well as some medical personnel, had been evacuated from Donetsk to Russia. Moscow has denied arming and supporting the rebels, but Strelkov’s words indicate that Russia is serving as a kind of haven for the rebels.
Strelkov also denied his fighters had the weapons system needed to shoot down an airliner.
Despite the escalating tensions and the new sanctions, Obama said this is not part of a new Cold War.
“What it is, is a very specific issue related to Russia’s unwillingness to recognize that Ukraine can chart its own path,” Obama said.
One of the senior administration officials said Russia hasn’t been this isolated “since the end of the Cold War.”
Obama said Russia could choose a different path.
“It didn’t have to come to this. It does not have to be this way,” Obama said. “This is a choice that Russia and President Putin in particular has made. … The path for a peaceful resolution to this crisis involves recognizing the sovereignty, the territorial integrity and the independence of the Ukrainian people.”
source: cnn.com
STUDIO 3 NEWCASTLE AUSTRALIA 