U.S. efforts to resolve Ukraine crisis fail on eve of vote

— The U.S. State Department issued a travel alert Friday, advising Americans in Russia about “the ongoing tensions in Ukraine and the potential for increased public demonstrations and anti-American actions in Russia in connection with Russian actions in the Crimea.”

Associated Press

The West braced Friday for a vote by the Crimean Peninsula to secede from Ukraine — and likely be annexed by Russia — as the last attempt at diplomacy broke down despite threats of costly international sanctions against Moscow for forcibly challenging a pro-European government in Kiev.

Russia’s top diplomat said Moscow will make no decisions about Crimea’s future, including whether to embrace it as a new territory, until after a local referendum Sunday to decide whether it should remain part of Ukraine.

But U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the vote’s results are all but a foregone conclusion, and urged Russia’s parliament against accepting any offer to claim Crimea as its own.

“We believe that a decision to move forward by Russia to ratify that vote officially within the Duma would, in fact, be a backdoor annexation of Crimea,” Kerry told reporters in London after six hours of talks Friday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

Kerry instead called on Moscow to support broad autonomy for Crimea — still as part of Ukraine — instead of a move by the strategic peninsula to secede.

Crimea, which is Ukraine’s strategic Black Sea peninsula of 2 million people, has a majority ethnic Russian population and hosts a large Russian naval base. The West and Ukraine’s upstart government in Kiev believes the region’s vote to secede is unconstitutional. But Moscow doesn’t recognize leaders in Kiev as legitimate since they pushed Ukraine’s pro-Russian president from power last month.

Lavrov, speaking separately to reporters, said Russia would respect the results of the Crimea vote but would not predict what would happen next.

“We lack a common vision of the situation, and differences remain,” Lavrov said of his negotiations with Kerry before heading back to Russia.

However, he said Moscow has no plans to invade southeast regions in Ukraine. Thousands of Russian troops amassed on Ukraine’s eastern border this week, including large artillery exercises involving 8,500 soldiers in the Rostov region alone.

U.S. officials have derided the exercises as an intimidation tactic and noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a similar buildup of troops in and around Crimea immediately before pro-Russian forces in the region overtook the local government and began policing streets with militias.

The diplomatic stalemate marked a last-ditch effort by the West to avoid a new diplomatic chill between Putin and the West. The showdown has been cast as a struggle for the future of Ukraine, a country with a size and population similar to France.

Much of western Ukraine favors ties with the 28-nation European Union, while many in the eastern part of the country have closer economic and traditional ties to Russia. Putin has worked for months to press Ukraine back into Russia’s political and economic orbit.

The West has resisted threatening the use of military force to keep Putin in check. Instead, officials have warned Moscow it will face a series of harsh sanctions against Russian officials and businesses, as well as others in Ukraine, who undermined the new government in Kiev that took over after deadly protests demanding economic opportunities offered in the West.

The EU and U.S. will impose sanctions as early as Monday.

“If the referendum takes place, there will be some sanctions,” Kerry said. “There’ll be some response.”