Biden Threatens Russia as Ukraine Ceasefire Looks Unlikely

Well, that didn’t last long.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko yesterday announced plans for
a ceasefire with the pro-Russian militants who control parts of
eastern Ukraine. Fighting has already resumed, and NATO claims that
Russia is again building up troops along the Ukrainian border. Vice
President Joe Biden today weighed in on the situation. 

Biden warned today
that the U.S. will “impose further costs on Russia” if the country
doesn’t rein in the separatists. Secretary of State John Kerry
issued a similar threat earlier this week when insurgents shot
down a Ukrainian military plane, killing
all 49 people on board. The U.S. has been expanding its
economic sanctions against Russia since mid-March. 

Reuters
reports on today’s action:

Both Ukrainian government and rebel accounts of the fighting
suggested a major battle involving armoured vehicles including
tanks. One military source said 4,000 separatists were involved,
while rebels sources in Donetsk said Ukrainian infantry supported
by 20 tanks and many other armoured vehicles were storming the
village of Yampil, about 12 kilometres east of Krasny Liman.

A top rebel commander, Igor Strelkov, reported “heavy losses” in
equipment and arms among the separatists, faced with a huge
superiority in heavy armour on the government side at Yampil.

“We beat off the first attack and destroyed one tank. But it is
difficult to take on 20 tanks. The battle is going on. Our people
are holding but we can’t rule out that they [government forces]
will break through,” Strelkov, who is also known as Girkin, said in
a video statement. He urged Moscow to “take some measures.”

On top of this setback to Poroshenko’s peace plan, NATO
Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen
asserts that Russia is only fanning the flames:

I can confirm that we now see a new Russian military buildup —
at least a few thousand more Russian troops deployed to the
Ukrainian border — and we see troop maneuvers in the neighborhood
of Ukraine. … If they’re deployed to seal the border and stop the
flow of weapons and fighters that would be a positive step. But
that’s not what we’re seeing.

Likewise, last week the Ukrainian government said that several
tanks had crossed the border from Russia through a separatist-held
checkpoint, a claim that NATO backed up with
satellite images. There is evidence that some of the fighters
for the so-called people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk are
actually
hired mercenaries from Chechnya and
Ingushetia.