Obama warns sactions against Russia are ‘teed up’

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.

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.

The Russian warnings came as an accord reached last week in Geneva to defuse the Ukraine crisis continued to crumble, with pro-Russian insurgents in the east defying calls for all sides to disarm and to vacate the buildings they are occupying.

The White House had initially planned to impose new sanctions on Russia last week, but delayed the move after Russia’s foreign minister signed the Geneva deal, two American officials who took part in the talks told The Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, Dutch, British and Danish fighter jets scrambled after a pair of Russian bombers approached their airspace over the North Sea on Wednesday. The Russian TU-95 Bear jets were escorted by the NATO members’ aircraft until they departed.

And the presidents of four post-Soviet republics and Ukraine’s foreign minister were meeting in Prague with EU nations Thursday to try to figure out how to stop Russia from blocking their increased ties.

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