Ukraine’s parliament approved a call by President Volodymyr Zelensky to declare a state of emergency in the country late on Wednesday, with a majority 335 MPs voting in favour.
“We put off this decision for a long time,” the national security chief Oleksiy Danilov said, “ . . . the situation is complicated but under control.” He added that the Russian threat would be greater if the domestic ‘destabilisation’ pursued by Moscow were allowed to be a factor.
The government earlier told its citizens to leave Russia, amid growing signs that Ukraine was veering closer to a full-blown war with its northern neighbour.
Kyiv’s move to introduce emergency rule comes after Zelensky called up reserve troops and his administration pleaded with the west to impose tougher sanctions on Russia.
The measures underlined the gravity of the situation facing Kyiv after Russia’s president Vladimir Putin ordered Russian “peacekeeping” forces into the breakaway eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.
The US announced sanctions against Russia on Tuesday, accusing Putin of beginning an invasion of Ukraine. These followed similar moves from the EU and the UK, which cast the measures as part of a first wave of economic curbs on Russia.
But Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, called on the west not to delay tougher sanctions if it wanted to deter Moscow from “further aggression”.
“First decisive steps were taken yesterday, and we are grateful for them. Now the pressure needs to step up to stop Putin. Hit his economy and cronies. Hit more. Hit hard. Hit now,” Kuleba said on Twitter.
UK prime minister Boris Johnson announced on Wednesday that additional defensive weapons were being sent to Ukraine “in light of the increasingly threatening behaviour” displayed by Russia.
The Ukrainian president urged calm and said he did not believe Russia would launch a major assault, although he said preparations were being made should one occur.
Zelensky said the deployment of reserve troops was not a mass mobilisation, stating: “We must increase the readiness of the Ukrainian army for all possible changes in the operational environment. We are talking exclusively about citizens assigned to the operational reserve.”
The state of emergency approved by parliament on Wednesday will have powers that fall short of martial law, putting Zelensky in charge of all decisions but allowing for measures to be implemented by special commissions composed of central and regional government authorities.
The emergency order will apply to all of Ukraine except for the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which have been under a separate regime since 2014 when Russia fomented a proxy separatist war there after annexing Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.
Danilov said the emergency measures would include enhanced security procedures in public places, restrictions and inspections on transport, and document checks.
“These are preventive measures imposed so that calm is preserved in the country, so that our economy continues to operate, so that our country continues to operate,” he said.
“The main aim of the Russian Federation is to reach their goals through domestic destabilisation,” he added. “Today’s decision was adopted to prevent this.”
As lawmakers were meeting, several Ukrainian government websites including that of its parliament, went down and some banking services were disrupted by denial of service cyber attacks. Netblocks, a group that tracks internet disruptions and shutdowns, said that among those targeted were Ukraine’s ministries of defence, foreign affairs, and internal affairs, and state banks PrivatBank and Oschadbank.
Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister in charge of digitalisation, said the attack began at about 4pm. This was the third big cyber attack targeting Ukraine this year.
Separately, Ukraine’s government told its citizens on Wednesday to avoid travelling to Russia, while Ukrainian citizens residing in Russia should “leave its territory immediately”.
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2022-02-23 20:24:04Z
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