As pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine ignored the provisions of a cease-fire agreement requiring them to abandon their occupation of government buildings on Sunday, the country’s acting prime minister appeared in a taped television interview and admitted that the country’s military and security apparatus could not defend the country against a Russian incursion.
“How can you stop the…Russian Federation, which spent billions of dollars to modernize their military?” Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk asked host David Gregory on NBC’s Meet the Press.
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He contrasted the state of Russia’s military – some 40,000 members of which are currently massed along Russia’s border with Ukraine – with the depleted state of his own country’s. Yatsenyuk blamed the corrupt government of Russia-aligned former President Viktor Yanukovych for allowing the Ukrainian military and security services to decline.
“In the last four years, the former president, together with the Russian supporters…dismantled Ukrainian military and security forces,” Yatsenyuk said. “We need to be in a very good shape in order to stop Russia. And for this shape we need to get real support from our western partners.”
Despite multiple attempts by Gregory to do so, Yatsenyuk refused to be led into asking specifically for weaponry – the sort of aid that would be freighted with far more political significance than the non-lethal support that has been provided so far. However, it was hard to read Yatsenyuk’s request as not including modern weapons.
“We need a strong and solid state. We need financial and economic support. We need to overhaul the Ukrainian military,” he repeated. “We need to modernize our security and military forces. We need real support.”
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Yatsenyuk argued that Russia under President Vladimir Putin is a threat not just to Ukraine, but also to global stability in general. Russia last month annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula under the guise of protecting ethnic Russians living there from political violence – violence that now appears to have been supported or even instigated by Russian soldiers and agents.
“Russia triggered this violence. Russia supported these terrorists,” said Yatsenyuk.
“President Putin has a dream to restore the Soviet Union and every day he goes further and further and God knows where is the final destination,” he continued.
Yatsenyuk ridiculed Russian demands that Ukraine rewrite its constitution to allow more autonomy for Eastern provinces that have large ethnic Russian populations. He compared it to Ukraine demanding that Russia declare Ukrainian an official language and grant special rights to ethnic Ukrainians, a large number of whom live in Russia.