{"id":23366,"date":"2018-11-27T01:22:50","date_gmt":"2018-11-27T01:22:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=23366"},"modified":"2018-11-27T01:22:50","modified_gmt":"2018-11-27T01:22:50","slug":"ukraine-imposes-martial-law-after-russia-seizes-ships-near-crimea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=23366","title":{"rendered":"Ukraine imposes martial law after Russia seizes ships near Crimea"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Kiev, Ukraine<\/strong>\u00a0– The parliament of Ukraine has backed a decree imposing martial law for 30 days following Russia’s seizure of three Ukrainian\u00a0<\/span>ships near the Crimean Peninsula.<\/p>\n

In an emergency session of the lower-house\u00a0Verkhovna Rada on Monday, parliamentarians voted in favour of President\u00a0Petro Poroshenko<\/a>‘s proposal to roll out the extraordinary measure from Wednesday onwards.<\/span><\/p>\n

The move came barely 24 hours\u00a0after Russian forces opened fire on the three Ukrainian ships near\u00a0the Kerch Strait, a narrow sea passage that divides Crimea from mainland Russia, wounding six servicemen<\/span>\u00a0and escalating a months-old naval confrontation that threatens to reignite Europe’s hottest armed conflict.<\/p>\n

Poroshenko initially proposed rolling out the decree for a 60-day period, but halved the proposed timeframe ahead of Monday’s parliamentary session.<\/p>\n

During a televised address prior to the vote, he also declared that the decree would not include any restrictions on citizens’ rights and\u00a0<\/span>ruled out any delay to elections scheduled to take place early next year.<\/p>\n

Addressing fears of heightened tensions between Kiev and Moscow, the 53-year-old had said earlier that the step did not mean a declaration of war against Russia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“Ukraine is not planning a war against anyone,” he told the National Security and Defense Council.<\/p>\n

Poroshenko also said that Ukraine<\/a> would stick to the Minsk Agreements, peace deals his government inked with Russia and pro-Russian separatists in southeastern Ukraine that were designed to stop a war that claimed more than 10,000 lives since 2014.<\/p>\n

The conflict began after pro-Western protesters overthrew pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych<\/a> in February 2014, following months of violent protests in the capital, Kiev.<\/p>\n

The separatists claimed the new, fiercely anti-Russian government planned a “genocide” of ethnic Russians in eastern regions, Ukraine’s rust belt and Yanukovych’s support base.<\/p>\n

The imposition of martial law permits the Ukrainian<\/span>\u00a0government to impose a range of drastic measures, if deemed necessary, including placing a ban public gatherings, restricting media freedoms, limiting the movement of Ukrainian nationals as well as foreign nationals and suspending elections.<\/p>\n

Poroshenko, whose approval ratings are below 10 percent, is widely believed to be seeking re-election in the March 31 vote.<\/p>\n

His cash-strapped and increasingly unpopular government relies on Western loans to keep the economy afloat.<\/p>\n

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Seized Ukrainian ships are seen anchored in a port of Kerch, Crimea on Monday [Pavel Rebrov\/Reuters]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

“We need new sanctions against Russia,” Mykola Tochitsky, Ukraine’s ambassador to the European Union, wrote on Twitter<\/span>\u00a0on Monday.<\/p>\n

“We must stop Kremlin’s war against Ukraine.”<\/p>\n

Poroshenko, for his part, called the attack “an act of aggression”.<\/p>\n

Moscow has claimed that Ukraine “provoked” the Russian ships by entering Crimea’s waters, however.<\/p>\n

The Ukrainian<\/span>\u00a0ships had left a military base in the Black Sea port of Odessa days earlier and circumnavigated Crimea to enter the Sea of Azov, a shallow body of water shared by Russia and Ukraine.<\/span><\/p>\n

On Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov hit back at the accusations from Kiev and accused Ukraine of violating “key norms of international law”.<\/p>\n

“We don’t have any doubts that this was done with the knowledge of Ukrainian authorities and was probably a direct order from the highest level of government,” Lavrov told reporters at a press conference in the Russian capital, Moscow.<\/p>\n

“I think we haven’t yet seen everything in terms of the consequences of yesterday’s provocation,” he added.<\/p>\n

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Kiev, Ukraine\u00a0– The parliament of Ukraine has backed a decree imposing martial law for 30 days following Russia’s seizure of three Ukrainian\u00a0ships near the Crimean Peninsula. In an emergency session of the lower-house\u00a0Verkhovna Rada on Monday, parliamentarians voted in favour of President\u00a0Petro Poroshenko’s proposal to roll out the extraordinary measure from Wednesday onwards. The move…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":23367,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}