The United States and its closest allies on Monday cast
Russia out of the Group of 8 industrialized democracies, their most exclusive
club, to punish President Vladimir V. Putin for his lightning annexation of
Crimea, while threatening tougher sanctions if he escalates aggression against Ukraine.
President Barack Obama and the leaders of Canada, Japan and
Europe's four strongest economies gathered for the first time since the Ukraine
crisis erupted last month, using a closed two-hour meeting on the sidelines of
a summit about nuclear security to project a united front against Moscow.
But they stopped short, at least for now, of imposing
sanctions against what a senior Obama administration official called vital
sectors of the Russian economy: energy, banking and finance, engineering and the
arms industry. Only further aggression by Putin - like rolling his forces into
the Ukrainian mainland - would prompt that much-harsher punishment, the
countries indicated in their joint statement, called The Hague Declaration.
"The biggest hammer that can drop is sectoral
sanctions, and the clearest trigger for those is eastern and southern
Ukraine," the senior administration official said.
Some critics of the administration said the suspension of
Russia from the G-8, which administration officials acknowledged was largely
symbolic, showed a lack of resolve among the allies to take tougher steps to
undo Putin's annexation of Crimea.
But it signified a firming of Western resolve compared with
the early days of the Crimea crisis, when Germany and some other allies said it
was premature to consider excluding Russia from the club of industrial
democracies. Having Russia as part of that group since 1998 was meant to signal
cooperation between East and West, and its exclusion inevitably raises new
echoes of Cold War-style rivalry.
Announcing that they would boycott a Group of 8 meeting
planned for Sochi - Putin's Black Sea showcase for the recent Winter Olympics -
the seven countries who met here said they would instead gather by themselves
in June in Brussels, headquarters of NATO and the European Union.
"We will suspend our participation in the G-8 until
Russia changes course," the seven countries declared in what constituted a
subtle appeal to Russian leaders outside Putin's circle to press for a switch
in direction.
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia eagerly
sought to join the tight circle of the world's top economies, eventually
gaining entry in 1998. For all that Putin shrugged off the threat of canceling
the Sochi summit this month - a shoulder shrug imitated here by his foreign
minister, Sergei V. Lavrov, on Monday - it is a blow to the Kremlin's search
for prestige.
Putin took membership in the group so seriously that he went
all out when it came time for Russia to host the annual meeting for the first
time. He rebuilt a broken-down czarist-era palace outside his hometown, St.
Petersburg, in part with the summit in mind, adding a series of new mansions to
the grounds for each leader to stay in. The Kremlin hired a Western public
relations agency to tout its status as host.
"Obviously, it's mostly symbolic, but symbols do
matter," said Michael A. McFaul, the just-departed U.S. ambassador to
Moscow. "The G-8 was something they wanted to be part of. This for them
was a symbol of being part of the big-boy club, the great power club - and the
club of democracies, I might add."
The Obama administration voiced satisfaction that the West
was united in punishing Russia, both now and in future, if it does not reverse
course. "There really wasn't much
disagreement" at the meeting either about Russia or the need to
swiftly aid Ukraine, the senior administration official said.
Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, who with her foreign
minister has had the most contact with Putin and other Russian officials during
this crisis, has been among the most forthright in rejecting Putin's actions,
despite the potential costs to Germany's economy.
German businesses sold almost 40 billion euros of goods to
Russia last year, and bought Russian imports of the same value, almost
exclusively oil and natural gas supplies that meet about one-third of Germany's
energy needs.
But Merkel has strengthened Germany's response over the past
two weeks after she perceived Putin as violating promises by annexing Crimea
and opting for old-fashioned nationalism and the use of military force over the
talk of cooperation and respect for borders that have governed East-West
relations in recent decades.
The support of Germany, the largest economy in Europe and a
longtime bellwether on Russian relations, is viewed as crucial to enforcing
tougher sanctions if they become necessary down the road. The administration
official said that any such sanctions would have "consequences for the
global economy and individual countries."
"The cost is far greater for the Russians, who stand
much more to lose," the official added.
Russia argues that Crimea has effectively been Russian
territory since the 18th century and was only put under Ukrainian sovereignty
by Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev in 1954 as a gesture of good will inside
the Soviet Union. It says its military intervention was meant to protect
Russian speakers from Ukrainian nationalists who helped topple the previous,
more pro-Russian government.
But Western leaders have condemned the military incursion as
a violation of both international law and specific Russian agreements with
Ukraine and the outside world, and disputed Russian claims that ethnic Russians
faced threats to their security in Crimea or elsewhere in Ukraine.
The leaders met on the sidelines of a nuclear security
summit arranged in advance of the Ukraine crisis. Merkel, speaking to German
reporters, noted that the two issues were deeply linked. Ukraine, she recalled,
renounced its Soviet-era nuclear weapons in 1994 by concluding the Budapest
Memorandum, an agreement with the United States, Britain and Russia to
guarantee the integrity of Ukraine.
That accord "has been flagrantly violated," she
noted.
Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general of the United Nations,
stressed in a speech to the full summit that he worried some current or future
nuclear powers could view the weapons as crucial to protect themselves against
invasion, undermining hopes of reducing their spread.
"Nuclear weapons should be seen as a liability and not
an asset," he said.
There was no mention in the Monday declaration of how much
assistance the West will now give Ukraine, either in cash or in bolstering a
relatively weak acting government until elections scheduled for May 25.
Ukraine has said it needs 1 billion euros in immediate
assistance, and the European Union is readying a further 11 billion euros for
this year, mostly through lending by European institutions.
The declaration emphasized instead the "central
role" of the International Monetary Fund in "lessening Ukraine's
economic vulnerabilities, and better integrating the country as a market
economy in the multilateral system."
"We remain united in our commitment to provide strong
financial backing to Ukraine," The Hague Declaration said, specifying that
it would bolster trade and strengthen security in the key field of energy.
European powers that depend heavily on Russia for natural
gas also indicated that they would pursue a strategy to reduce dependence on
Russian energy by June, though any effort to shift suppliers is likely to take
many months or years.
