MUNICH — Russia’s foreign minister slammed Western support of Ukraine’s opposition, suggesting Saturday that it is helping fuel the escalation of violence.
Ukraine has faced two months of major protests that started after President Viktor Yanukovych backed off an agreement to deepen ties with the European Union in favor of relations with Moscow.
The protests had been mostly peaceful until mid-January, when demonstrators angered by new anti-protest laws launched violent clashes with police. Three protesters died in the clashes, two of them from gunshot wounds. Police insist they didn’t fire the fatal shots.
At a gathering of the world’s top diplomats and defense officials in Munich, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov took issue with what he said were “prominent European politicians actually encouraging such actions.”
“What does incitement of increasingly violent street protests have to do with promoting democracy?” Lavrov said. “Why don’t we hear condemnations of those who seize and hold government buildings, burn, torch the police, use racist and anti-Semitic and Nazi slogans?”
Speaking before Lavrov, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen blamed security forces in Ukraine for using excessive force, and added that “Ukraine must have the freedom to choose its own path without external pressure.”
One of Ukraine’s top opposition leaders, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, said his country needs more than “vocal support” from the West.
Yatsenyuk, along with fellow opposition politicians Vitali Klitschko and Petro Poroshenko, met U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. The State Department said Kerry encouraged the opposition to remain united and peaceful and keep talking with the government.
Klitschko left the conference briefly to address several hundred supporters at a demonstration about a half-mile away.
“We want to be a modern European country, live with a secure future,” Klitschko, a former heavyweight boxing champion, told the crowd. “Without a fight, there’s no victory. Therefore, we must fight.”
Lavrov suggested that a possible solution to tensions such as those over Ukraine was a free-trade zone including the European Union and a customs union of former Soviet states, floated in the past by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Later, Fogh Rasmussen scoffed at that suggestion, telling reporters that Russia used “both sticks and carrots to get their immediate neighbors to join” a customs union and other trade agreements in the past.
