US/NATO War on Russia

[David Guyatt]

The first open provocation following HR 758?

Ukraine angers Russia with landmark step towards Nato

Russia's foreign minister says vote to drop neutral status is counterproductive and will only boost tensions

• Agencies in Kiev and Moscow
  
• The Guardian, Tuesday 23 December 2014 11.52 GMT
  

Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, who has described Ukraine's renunciation of its neutral status as a counterproductive step. Photograph: Sergei Chirikov/EPA

The Ukrainian parliament has renounced the country's non-aligned status with the aim of eventually joining Nato, to the anger of Moscow, which views the western alliance's eastward expansion as a security threat.
Kiev first announced its intention of seeking the protection of Nato membership in August, following what it deemed the open participation of Russia's military in a separatist war in Ukraine's eastern provinces.
Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, called Ukraine's renunciation of its neutral military and political status a "counterproductive" step that would only boost tensions around the crisis in the east.
"It will only escalate the confrontation and creates the illusion that it is possible to resolve Ukraine's deep internal crisis by passing such laws," Tass news agency quoted him as saying.
Addressing deputies in Kiev before the vote, the Ukrainian foreign minister said the move underscored the country's determination to pivot towards Europe and the west. "This will lead to integration in the European and the Euro-Atlantic space," Pavlo Klimkin said.
The amendment passed easily, receiving 303 votes 77 more than the minimum required to pass into law.
In a Facebook post on Monday, Russia's prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, warned that "in essence, an application for Nato membership will turn Ukraine into a potential military opponent for Russia".
Medvedev said that Ukraine's rejection of neutrality and a new Russian sanctions law that US President Barack Obama signed on Friday "will both have very negative consequences".
"And our country will have to respond to them," he wrote.
Any accession to the western military alliance is likely to take years, but a Nato spokesman in Brussels said: "Our door is open and Ukraine will become a member of Nato if it so requests and fulfils the standards and adheres to the necessary principles."
Relations between Moscow and Kiev are at an all-time low since Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in March and the subsequent outbreak of the pro-Russia rebellion in the east.
Pro-western authorities in Kiev accuse Russia of orchestrating and arming the uprising after the overthrow of a Ukrainian president sympathetic to Moscow. The Kremlin denies it is behind the revolt.
For its part Russia completed the creation of a new economic alliance with four other ex-Soviet nations on Tuesday, intended to bolster their integration.
The Eurasian Economic Union, which includes Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan, comes to existence on 1 January. In addition to free trade, it will coordinate the members' financial systems and regulate their industrial and agricultural policies along with labour markets and transportation networks.
Russian president Vladimir Putin said the new union will have a combined economic output of $4.5tn and bring together 170 million people.
"The Eurasian integration is based on mutual benefit and taking into account mutual interests," he said after the talks.