West told Ukraine to abandon Crimea, document says

A newly-published transcript of Ukrainian crisis talks two years ago indicates that EU powers and the US urged Kiev not to resist Russia’s invasion of Crimea.

The document, published by Ukrainska Pravda, an investigative website, on Tuesday (23 February) contains the official minutes of talks by Ukraine's National Security and Defence Council on 28 February 2014.

The meeting, chaired by the then acting president Oleksandr Turchynov, was called one week after former president Viktor Yanukovych fell from power and one day after Russian special forces seized local government buildings on the Black Sea peninsula.

For his part, Turchynov was the only member of the council who wanted to declare a state of war and to fight back.

But his ministers and others present at the talks warned him that Ukraine couldn’t do it alone and that the West wouldn’t help.

“We’re not ready for full-scale war. We need time. We need help. We need a tough reaction by the world, the international community. I’ll speak frankly. Today we have no army. It was systematically destroyed by Yanukovych and his entourage,” the defence minister, Ihor Tenyukh, said.

He said Ukraine could mobilise up to 5,000 troops. But he said Russia was holding military drills on Ukraine’s eastern border which involved 38,000 troops with armoured, air, and naval support.

“It’s not just a demonstration of power, but a real preparation for the invasion of our territory,” Tenyukh said, noting that Russian tanks could reach Kiev in one day.

Other ministers told Turchynov not to expect popular resistance because the “dominant” mood of people in Crimea was on the Russian side.

Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister who had just been freed from jail and who attended the meeting in an informal capacity, said: “Can you imagine what will happen in the country when tanks and armoured vehicles roll through the streets? This will cause mass panic. People will massively flee the country.”

Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the then PM, who had taken office just one day earlier, told Turchynov that the country had no money to fund a war because the Yanukovych regime had stolen it.

“We have a treasury account with no money in it at all,” he said.

US moved warships

Yatsenyuk went on to say it’s “a pity” that the US had pulled back two warships from its Sixth Fleet which had been stationed in the Black Sea in a telling sign of Western intentions.

Asked by Turchynov if Nato is “afraid” to give Ukraine any form of assistance, the PM replied: “In today's environment, clearly.”

“I don’t think that any country, including those of the Budapest Memorandum, will be willing to help Ukraine,” he said, referring to a 1994 treaty in which France, the UK, and the US had promised to protect Ukraine in return for its dismantling of its nuclear arsenal.

He said Western states want to avoid “a military conflict with Russia in the middle of Europe ... We have to cope on our own”.

“We're talking about declaring war on Russia,” Yatsenyuk said, according to the Ukrainska Pravda document.

“Right after we do this, there will be a Russian statement on ‘defending Russian citizens and Russian speakers who have ethnic ties with Russia.’ That’s the script the Russians have written, and we're playing to that script,” he added.

Georgia script

Tymoshenko added that the Crimea scenario resembled that of Georgia in 2008.

The 2008 war began when Russia-controlled fighters in the breakaway South Ossetia region in Georgia escalated skirmishes and ambushes against Georgian troops.

When the then Georgian leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, fired back on the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, Russia invaded Georgia and almost reached Tbilisi.

Saakashvili thought that the US or Nato would come to his assistance. But no one did.

“He [Russian leader Vladimir Putin] is just waiting for us to give him an reason. Remember how Saakashvili swallowed his bait and lost? … I'm calling on you to think seven times before we take a single step,” Tymoshenko said.

Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, Turchynov’s intelligence chief, echoed the warnings.

“The Americans and Germans - all of them in one voice are asking us not to start any action because, according to their intelligence, Putin will use it to start a large-scale land invasion.”

Doves of peace

The meeting bandied round other ideas, such as calling for a UN statement, asking the West for financial aid, and urging Ukrainian expats to picket Russian embassies around the world.

The strategy was summed up by Tymoshenko, who said: “We have to become the most peaceful nation on the planet, to behave like doves of peace.”

The Ukrainian army, joined by volunteer brigades, did fight back when Russia’s hybrid forces, shortly afterward, also invaded the Donbass region in east Ukraine.

The conflict has so far claimed at least 9,000 lives and displaced more than 1 million people.

But Ukraine still hasn’t declared a state of war with Russia and Western powers still haven’t given it military assistance.

The EU and US instead imposed economic sanctions on Russia. But with the West angling for Russian cooperation on the Syria war and the refugee crisis, these could be dissolved in July.

The EU and US say they won’t recognise Russia’s annexation of Crimea and that separate sanctions on doing business in the annexed territory will stay in place for the long term.

But even Ukrainian diplomats don’t think they’ll get Crimea back unless there’s profound change inside Russia, as in the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union set back its former conquests.