MOSCOW  - Russia on Wednesday accused NATO of succumbing to “Cold War” instincts after the alliance suspended all cooperation with Moscow over the Crimea crisis.
“Basic instincts of Cold War have awoken in NATO, affecting rhetoric accordingly,” the official Twitter page of Russia’s mission to NATO quoted envoy Alexander Grushko as saying. “‘The alliance is under threat!’ Seems like taxpayers will have to fork out for military games,” he said.
The Western alliance’s Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen on Tuesday said that NATO is “suspending all practical cooperation with Russia, military and civilian” over Moscow’s speedy annexation of the Crimea peninsula and reported massing of troops near Ukraine’s border.
Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin derided the announcement, remarking that it was made on April Fool’s Day.
“Last time (in 2008) they were freezing for three months, and thawed by December,” he said, referring to Russia’s short war with neighbouring Georgia. “What can I say: it’s a Cold War, so they are still freezing,” he wrote on Twitter.
Meanwhile, Crimea’s Tatars are considering the possibility of a vote on increased autonomy, a local leader has said, a move likely to deepen the crisis on the Russian-controlled peninsula. The minority group’s assembly, known as the Mejlis, has created a special group to look into the possibility of holding a “referendum within one ethnic group”, said its leader Refat Chubarov in a statement released late on Tuesday.
“We are now trying to find international precedents and international organisations which can help us in that,” Chubarov said in the statement.
Representatives of the Turkish-speaking Muslim group - who number around 300,000 in a total population of 2 million Crimeans - are expected to convene before April 15 to consider the issue.
An emergency Qurultai, or congress, of the Crimean Tatars last week decided to seek increased autonomy on the peninsula in a move widely seen as a challenge to the Kremlin. The community largely boycotted a March 16 referendum in which a Russian-speaking majority voted to split from Ukraine and become part of Russia.
The Tatars’ spiritual leader, Mustafa Dzhemilev, is a Ukrainian lawmaker, and many Tatars say they want to be part of Ukraine. Moscow has been conspicuously quiet over the Tatars’ decision to seek more self-rule.
Local authorities have said the minority’s representatives would be offered posts in the local government but the Tatars want a quota system to ensure a guaranteed level of representation.
Speaking at a closed-door session of the UN Security Council meeting earlier this week, Dzhemilev said that some 5,000 Tatars had already left the peninsula and warned of possible bloodshed.
Vladimir Konstantinov, leader of the regional legislature, told reporters on Wednesday that the representatives of the minority would be actively involved in decision-making. He appeared to downplay the Tatar leaders’ appeal for more autonomy. “We do not pay attention to any political statements of certain leaders,” he said. “It’s just an issue of the period of transition.”
The Crimean Tatars, native inhabitants of the peninsula, spent decades in Central Asia after Joseph Stalin ordered their banishment, ostensibly for Nazi collaboration.
Energy musn’t be used as a weapon, Washington’s top diplomat said Wednesday as the EU and US vowed to help Ukraine overcome energy shortages after a painful Moscow gas-price hike.
“No nation should use energy to stymie a people’s aspirations. It should not be used as a weapon,” US Secretary of State John Kerry said as he opened a meeting of the US-EU Energy Council.
Speaking a day after Moscow heaped even more pressure on Ukraine’s teetering economy with the painful hike, Kerry added: “We can’t allow it to be used as a political weapon or as an instrument for aggression.”
The US and its European allies were working “in lockstep” to bring gas to Ukraine from neighbouring Poland and Hungary as well as to develop a route from Slovakia, said the diplomat, who co-chaired the meeting with EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.
Ukraine, which is heavily dependent on gas supplies from its former Soviet master, has also agreed as part of an IMF bailout package to rein in its energy subsidies. This would “make their energy market more competitive. This is critical, obviously,” Kerry said.
In a joint statement issued after the meeting, the council said the “developments in Ukraine have brought energy security concerns to the fore and prove the need to reinforce energy security in Europe.”
It also delivered a warning to Moscow that “energy relations with Russia must be based on reciprocity, transparency, fairness” in order “to ensure a level playing field for the safe and secure supply of energy.”
The meeting came a day after Russia said Ukraine will now pay $385.5 per 1,000 cubic metres of gas from the previous cut rate of $268.5.
The council vowed to work with Ukraine as it seeks to diversify its gas supplies and transform its system of subsidies “into targeted measures that mitigate the impact of price increases on the poor and vulnerable.”
Kerry also highlighted that the US and Europe had work to do to diversify their own supplies, as the United States develops plans to become energy self-sufficient through such technologies as fracking.
“Our new capacities as a gas producer and the approval of seven export licenses is going to help supply gas to global markets, and we look forward to doing that starting in 2015,” Kerry said.
“We will supply more gas than all of Europe consumes today.”
The council meeting also discussed plans for a southern gas corridor which aims to bring gas from the Caspian via a pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkey and then on to Europe.