"Mr. Putin, this is no joke, no incident, no crisis, this is war," - Poroshenko on unprovoked attack on Ukrainian warships. VIDEO
President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko stresses the need for a NATO presence in the Black Sea and fresh U.S. and EU sanctions that would stop the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline amid growing tensions in the Black and Azov Sea regions.
As reported by Censor.NET, in an interview with Fox News posted on his official page on Facebook, Ukraine’s president directly appealed to President Vladimir Putin and called Russia's aggression in the Sea of Azov a war.
On Nov. 25, Russian border vessels committed aggressive actions against three Ukrainian ships that set sail from the port of Odesa to the port of Mariupol in the Azov Sea. After that, Russian special forces opened fire on the Ukrainian tugboat Yany Kapu, small armored artillery boats Berdiansk and Nikopol in the Kerch Strait and seized them. There were 23 sailors on board the ships, and six of them were wounded.
Russia announced its intention to try detained Ukrainian sailors for allegedly illegal crossing of the Russian state border.
On Nov. 26, the UN Security Council held an emergency meeting on the situation in Ukraine related to the latest developments in the Black and Azov Seas.
Later on the same day, Ukraine's parliament gave the green light to a presidential decree on the introduction of martial law for 30 days in 10 regions of Ukraine – Vinnytsia region, Luhansk region, Mykolaiv region, Odesa region, Sumy region, Kharkiv region, Chernihiv region, Kherson region, Donetsk region and Zaporizhia region, as well as the inland waters of the Azov-Kerch water area.
On Nov. 28, the Russian rubberstamp district court of Simferopol city in Crimea arrested 24 Ukrainian sailors, who had been captured by Russian FSB near the Kerch Strait, for two months. They all face six years in prison.
Russia insists that Ukraine’s vessels were seized after they entered its territorial waters illegally and carried out "provocative actions".
