Mediaboss Marketing

President Obama said Thursday that new sanctions targeting Russia are "teed up" in the wake of a fresh warning by the Russian foreign minister that attacks on Russian citizens or interests in Ukraine would bring a firm response.

Obama said Russia has not abided by the spirit or the letter of an agreement reached in Geneva last week that aimed to ease tensions in eastern Ukraine. He said Russia has failed to halt aggression by pro-Russian militants in the region.

Still, he cautioned that the United States needs to secure the support of allies to ensure that additional economic pressure is even applied. He conceded that new sanctions may not change Russian President Vladimir Putin's intentions and that the crisis in Ukraine may not subside.

"How well they change his calculus depends on the cooperation of other countries," Obama said during a news conference with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe during his first stop of a four-country tour of Asia.

The president did not put a timeline on when sanctions could be applied, saying only it was a matter of days, not weeks.

"It's important to emphasize that throughout this process our goal has been to change Mr. Putin's calculus, that our preference is to resolve this diplomatically, that sanctions hurt Russia more than anybody else but they are disruptive to the global economy," Obama said.

Meanwhile, Russia's foreign minister warned Wednesday that attacks on Russian interests in Ukraine would prompt a firm response and drew a comparison to the circumstances that opened the war with Georgia in 2008.

"Russian citizens being attacked is an attack against the Russian Federation," Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, a day after Ukraine announced it was re-launching a campaign against pro-Russian insurgents occupying government facilities in the mostly Russian-speaking east.

"If we were attacked we could certainly respond," Lavrov said, speaking on the Kremlin-funded satellite TV channel RT.

Lavrov's warning came as the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a separate statement demanding that Ukraine pull its armed forces out of the crisis-ridden region.

Follow this link:
Obama warns sanctions against Russia are 'teed up' as tension builds in Ukraine