The unexpected announcement came as Ukraine's new pro-European leaders raced against the clock to rally Western support in the face of the seizure by Kremlin-backed forces of the strategic Black Sea peninsula and plans to hold a referendum on Sunday to switch its allegiance from Kiev to Moscow.
Russian President Vladimir Putin
...Second and fourth President of the Russian Federation and the first to remain sober. Putin is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from polonium poisoning. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to Putin. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead...'s threat to invade Ukraine after last month's ouster of a pro-Kremlin regime by pro-EU leaders has set off the most explosive crisis in East-West relations since the Cold War.
US President Barack Obama
I inhaled. That was the point...
and his European allies are urging Russia to call its Crimean troops back to their barracks and launch immediate negotiations with a Ukrainian leadership that Putin claims rose to power thanks to an "unconstitutional coup".
But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Putin yesterday that proposals he had received from US Secretary of State John F.
I was in Vietnam, you knowKerry
Former Senator-for-Life from Massachussetts, self-defined war hero, speaker of French, owner of a
lucky hat,conqueror of Cambodia, and current Secretary of State...
on resolving the stand-off "do not suit us very much".
Lavrov said documents he had received from Kerry on Friday were "framed as if there exists a conflict between Russia and Ukraine."
He added that Washington was basing its solution on a recognition of Kiev's new leaders while Russia still considered the ousted Viktor Yanukovich as the legitimate president of Ukraine.
"Our partners proposed moving forward on the basis of a situation born out of a state coup," Lavrov told Putin.
But Lavrov gave no indication about when or where Russia's proposals would be made public. He added that Kerry had delayed a visit to Moscow he planned for yesterday to finalise the details of Washington's crisis plan.