WASHINGTON – The United States won’t recognize a secession vote in Crimea and is ready to support Ukraine against a Russian take-over “in every way possible,” a White House official said Sunday.
“We are putting as much pressure on the Russians as we can to do the right thing,” White House Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“President Putin has a choice about what he’s going to do here,” he said. “Is he going to continue to further isolate himself, further hurt his economy, further diminish Russian influence in the world, or is he going to do the right thing?”
Meanwhile, the Russian Foreign Ministry claimed a breakthrough in talks between Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, CBS News reported.
The agreement to seek a diplomatic solution to the crisis, including unspecified “constitutional reform in Crimea,” was not immediately confirmed by US officials.
Crimea was conducting a vote Sunday on breaking away from Ukraine and joining Russia, and Russian troops had massed on the country’s eastern border.
The vote on the Crimean peninsula, a pro-Russian region that is home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet, is expected to back secession.
US officials dismissed the balloting as “bogus.”
Leaders in Congress said they are ready to slap powerful economic sanctions on Russia if it attempts to annex Crimea or invades eastern Ukraine.
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that Putin was playing “Russian Roulette” and that the US and Europe were ready to pull the trigger on “very robust sanctions.”
“The United States and the West have to be very clear in their response, because [Putin] will calculate about how far he can go,” Menendez said on “Fox News Sunday.”
On the same show, Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, the top Republican on the committee, said the sanctions package working its way through the Senate would be “very biting” on Russia.
“This will be a major miscalculation on the part of Putin if he were to move in to eastern Ukraine,” he said. “I don’t think that’s going to happen but, look, he’s taken steps in the past where he has miscalculated.”
He added that the US and Europe “are showing tremendous resolve in countering this and certainly it would be a huge economic problem for him is her were to do this.”
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who just returned from Ukraine, also called for the United States to take forceful action, stopping short of sending US troops.
“There’s no contemplation of U.S. military action, but there’s a whole lot of things the United States of America could do,” McCain said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
McCain, an outspoken critic of President Obama’s foreign policy, said the crisis was “the ultimate result of a feckless foreign policy where no one believes in America’s strength anymore.”