Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea represents the most serious security crisis to erupt in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Russia has violated international law, defied the international community, damaged its rapprochement with Europe and the United States that has characterised the last 20 years and laid the basis for a potential new Cold War.

It is true Crimea’s integration with Moscow came after a referendum in the region – which has a majority Russian population – and approved by 97 per cent of the electorate. However, besides the fact that under the Ukrainian Constitution a referendum held in only a part of the country is illegal, Russia’s sudden occupation of Crimea went against all internationally-accepted norms of behaviour.

If Moscow believed Crimea was wrongly given to Ukraine in 1954 by then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev – before that it was always part of Russia – it should have opened talks with Kiev on discussing the matter and arriving at a mutually acceptable agreement.

Worryingly, Russia’s sudden infringement of Ukraine’s territorial integrity is in direct defiance of an agreement signed in 1994 by the then-leaders of the US, Russia, the UK and Ukraine, which guaranteed the security of Ukraine in exchange for Kiev giving up its nuclear weapons.

In that deal, Russia, the US and the UK had agreed “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and promised “to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine”. Would Russia have acted in the same way it did if Ukraine still possessed its nuclear arsenal?

Russia’s defence of its behaviour in Ukraine includes the claim that Russian speakers were threatened by Ukraine’s new government. Yet, there is absolutely no evidence to support such an assertion. Of course, Russian speakers should have full rights and equality before the law and the first mistake of the new government in Kiev, very foolishly, was to repeal a law giving Russian the same status as Ukrainian. This decision has now been reversed but was hardly a justification to annex part of the country.

Russia’s actions have certainly earned it no friends. It suffered the humiliation of having to veto a resolution by the United Nations Security Council condemning its actions in Ukraine, which was approved by a 13 – 1 vote; even China, its traditional ally, abstained.

As a first step in response to Moscow’s behaviour, both the US and the EU have now introduced travel bans and asset freezes against a number of Russian and Ukrainian officials who they consider to have been personally involved in Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.

Neither Brussels nor Washington want a new Cold War and probably neither does Moscow; indeed Vladimir Putin’s actions are most likely more the result of Russia’s centuries-old paranoia with the states its shares a border with. Yet, this obsession must stop; it is out of place in the 21st century and Ukraine has every right to look towards Europe for its future.

EU leaders as well as US President Barack Obama have made it clear that economic sanctions will follow any attempt by Russia to occupy parts of eastern Ukraine, which have large Russian-speaking populations and which have witnessed some incidents of violence instigated by Moscow.

Russia needs to take stock of the situation, tone down its rhetoric, recognise the new government in Kiev and enter into bilateral talks with it, and commit itself to no further violations of Ukrainian sovereignty. An escalation of this crisis is in nobody’s interest and the world simply cannot afford to witness the emergence of a new Cold War.

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