Russia’s refusal to stop supporting Ukrainian separatists contributed to “the appalling” loss of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, British prime minister David Cameron has told Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Demanding Moscow now change course, Mr Cameron yesterday warned that Russia faces tougher sanctions – now backed to different degrees by London, Berlin, Paris and Amsterdam, saying he told Mr Putin: “The world is now watching.”
The telephone conversation with the Russian leader – one London had sought late last week but had failed to get – occurred after Mr Cameron had spoken with German chancellor Angela Merkel.
Dr Merkel has so far been slower than other EU leaders to push in public for tougher sanctions, saying she would wait for crash reports and a “list of companies contributing to the destabilisation and territorial breaches” in Ukraine.
She has said investigators needed time to piece together information about the crash just as the EU needed time to draft a legal basis for possible “stage three” sanctions against Russian companies.
Shared economic pain
However, 10 Downing Street believes the EU is ready to act. Newly appointed foreign secretary Philip Hammond acknowledged sanctions would affect the City of London, but said the pain needed to be "shared" across the EU.
He said the EU had “the tools” to “inflict damage on the Russian economy”. Moscow had to learn there would be “stiffer and longer-lasting consequences”, he said.
He continued: “What we need to do now is use the sense of shock, the sense of outrage, to galvanise opinion behind a more robust stance.”
Mr Putin must put pressure on pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine to allow international teams to secure the crash site, begin the investigation and “recover and repatriate the victims”, said Downing Street.
The families of the dead deserved no less, Mr Cameron told Mr Putin, adding that “the delays and restrictions” faced so far by those who tried to carry out such actions has been “completely unacceptable and indefensible”.
Like his Dutch counterpart Mark Rutte, Mr Cameron is furious about the obstruction of efforts to repatriate the bodies of the victims.
“It is completely unacceptable that the Russian government blocked further pressure from the United Nations security council on this very issue, claiming that there is no issue around access,” said a spokeswoman for Mr Cameron.
Two senior British police officers are in Kiev to meet Ukrainian authorities and international counterparts, and are ready to move to the crash site, though evidence is disappearing from there by the hour.
Sanctions
Despite talk in London yesterday that there is agreement with Berlin and Paris about tougher sanctions, it is clear that the details of any such action are from negotiated,
with each capital having particular needs they want to protect.
Dr Merkel has accused Moscow of not exerting adequate controls over the border traffic of the kind of weapons used to down the Malaysia Airlines aircraft.
“We have to assume that the Russian president has influence on separatists, at least on part of them,” she said.
Illustrating the pressure building inside the EU on Dr Merkel in advance of Tuesday’s Brussels meeting, Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski accused western European leaders yesterday of “doing too little to influence Russia’s behaviour”.
Over the weekend, the first leading figures in Dr Merkel’s Christian Democrats were sent out to fly kites on further tougher sanctions against Russia, with the party’s foreign policy spokesman, Ruprecht Polenz, suggesting an “EU oil-embargo against Russia would hit the country”.
Other senior CDU figures have gone further, calling for a deployment of UN peacekeepers in eastern Ukraine. “We are now in a phase where we have to think about a deployment under the auspices of the UN,” said Andreas Schockenhoff, a senior CDU Russian analyst.