WASHINGTON - The United States and the European Union are united towards continuation of putting pressure on Russia over the Ukrainian crisis, U.S. Secretary John Kerry said.
“Today, we reviewed the alarming situation in Ukraine, where we are continuing to press Russia to live by the Minsk agreements which they signed onto, which they negotiated, which they said they would keep,” US Secretary of State John Kerry said during a press conference for the press with EU High Representative Federica Mogherini in Washington.
He blamed Russian-backed separatists of attacking a full-scale initiative against the city of Debaltseve, and in an attempt to obviously gain control of a very significant rail juncture. This is, according to him, “a blatant violation of the Minsk agreement”.
Meanwhile, Kerry called on all sides to end the fighting and to implement the Minsk agreement.
“So I want to make it very clear that the United States continues to strongly support Ukraine’s territorial integrity. We condemn all actions that are aimed at undermining its sovereignty or at trying to gain one advantage or another after the ceasefire for the purpose of negotiating down the road,” he stressed.
Kerry also swore the US will do its best to help Ukraine with respect to the serious economic challenge that it faces.
Mogherini, in turn, said that that EU and US coordinate their actions over sanction measures against Russia.
“Not only we developed our sanctions policy together, but we’re going to follow up our sanctions policy together in a coordinated way. We discussed that – we started to discuss that with the foreign ministers in Brussels on Monday,” she stressed.
According to the diplomat, any kind of decision on sanctions is going to be based only on the full implementation of the Minsk agreement, and “it is in the hands of the Russians now to fulfill their own commitments, as you said, and that is going to be the only basis on which the European Union is going to decide any further steps on sanctions.”
Mogherini said that a political pressure on Russia should be intensified in support of President Poroshenko’s efforts that was the first one who initiated process to talk to Putin and reached the Minsk agreements in this way.
“You can have the pressure on the economic level; the economic pressures work in economic terms, but then you need also to have a political channel to make sure that the changes, which are severe on the Russian economy, produce some result in a change of attitude on Russian policy,” she said.
Mogherini said that yesterday they in Europe discussed strengthening of the diplomatic effort, political effort that could be used “to make sure that the economic pressures brings not only economic results – in this case, negative economic results on the Russian economy, which has been declared by the Russian leadership, in a crisis situation – but how we make sure that there is a political channel that makes it translate into a political result, which is the end of the conflict in Ukraine.”
