https://ift.tt/vo5NEli. President Joe Biden cut off the Russian government from international financing on Tuesday and imposed sanctions on two large banks, declaring that its movement of troops into eastern Ukraine was “a flagrant violation of international law.”
In a brief White House speech to the American public, Biden said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s order late Monday to send troops across the eastern Ukraine border into the Luhansk and Donetsk regions was “the beginning of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.” Hours earlier, Putin had declared the regions as independent, no longer part of Ukraine.
Biden pointedly asked, “Who in the Lord’s name does Putin think gives him the right to declare new so-called countries on territory that belonged to his neighbors?”
The U.S. leader said his sanctions would cut off the Russia government “from raising money from the West,” and vowed that Russia “will pay an even steeper price (with more sanctions) if its forces advance further” west into Ukraine.
He said the United States has no intention of “fighting Russia.” But he said that “none of us should be fooled, none of us will be fooled” by Putin’s intentions in deploying what he characterized as “peacekeeping forces” into the one-time Soviet republic, which has been independent since 1991.
On Monday, in a Kremlin speech, Putin declared that Ukraine was never an independent state and belonged as part of a greater Russian sphere of influence, not a “puppet” of the West.
“He directly attacked Ukraine’s right to exist,” Biden said of Putin, while adding there is “still time to avert the worst-case scenario” of a full-scale invasion, through diplomatic settlement of the crisis.
But, Biden concluded, “We’re going to judge Russia by its actions, not its words.”