Putin accuses Ukraine’s Poroshenko of Black Sea ‘provocation’

Vladimir Putin has accused Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, of orchestrating a naval “provocation” in the Black Sea at the weekend to bolster his popularity ratings before an election next year.

Russia seized three Ukrainian naval vessels and their crews on Sunday over what it said was their illegal entry into Russian waters, which Ukraine denies.

“It was without doubt a provocation,” Putin said. “It was organised by the president ahead of the elections. The president is in fifth place ratings-wise and therefore had to do something. It was used as a pretext to introduce martial law.”

The Russian president, speaking at a financial forum in Moscow, said the west was ready to forgive Ukrainian politicians their shortcomings because it bought into the anti-Russian narrative that Kiev was promoting. He said the Ukrainian vessels had clearly been in the wrong.

“Military vessels intruded into Russian territorial waters and did not answer [the border guards] … What were they supposed to do?” he said.

“They would do the same in your country, this is absolutely obvious,” he told a foreign investor. “These territorial waters were always ours, even before Crimea joined Russia.”

Kiev introduced martial law in parts of the country after the incident, saying it feared a possible Russian invasion.

It has emerged that Russia is sending more of its advanced S-400 surface-to-air missile systems to Crimea amid the rising tensions.

The Kremlin has steadily poured new military hardware into Crimea since it annexed the peninsula from Ukraine in 2014, turning it into what state-backed media have called a fortress. A Reuters journalist reported seeing a Russian warship deploying near Crimea.

The Black Sea episode risks derailing a meeting between Putin and Donald Trump at the G20 in Argentina this week. The US president said on Tuesday he might cancel the meeting as a result of the incident, but the Kremlin said on Wednesday it thought the talks would proceed as planned.

Vadim Astafyev, a spokesman for Russia’s southern military district, was cited by Russian news agencies as saying that a new battalion of S-400 missiles would be delivered to Crimea soon and become operational by the end of the year.

The deployment is likely to have been long planned, but the timing of the announcement appeared designed to send a message to Ukraine and the west that Russia is serious about defending what it regards as its own territory and waters.

Crimea hosts three battalions of the anti-aircraft missile systems with a range of up to 250 miles (400km), allowing Russia to control swathes of the skies above the Black Sea. The new deployment would allow it to increase its air defence coverage area.

The US previously said Russia’s deployment of the missile systems to Crimea was “not good”.

A Reuters correspondent in Crimea on Wednesday observed a Russian navy minesweeper ship, the Vice-Admiral Zakharin, heading for the Sea of Azov, which is used by Ukraine and Russia and is a source of growing tension.

Russia’s Izvestia newspaper, citing sources in Ukraine’s ruling circles, reported that Kiev had been trying to persuade Washington – so far unsuccessfully – to open a military base in Ukraine. The report could not independently confirmed.

A Crimean court is due to order the detention of nine of the 24 captured Ukrainian sailors, including senior Ukrainian naval officers and at least one member of Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency.

This week a court in Simferopol, the capital of Crimea, ordered the other 15 Ukrainian sailors to be detained for two months pending a possible trial.

All of the sailors could face jail terms of up to six years if found guilty of what Moscow says was a plot to illegally cross the Russian border by trying to pass through the Russian-controlled Kerch Strait on Sunday without notice and ignoring calls to stop.

Ukraine says its ships did nothing wrong and have every right to use the strait, the only gateway to the Sea of Azov from the Black Sea, without Russian permission.