President Barack Obama told President Vladimir Putin by phone today (March 1, 2014) that Russia's dispatch of troops to take control of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula on the Black Sea violated international law, and warned he was courting political isolation of Russia if the incursion continues, the AFP (Agence France-Presse) website reports.
Obama also spelled out the right of the people of Ukraine to chart their own destiny and symbolically began to line up the long-time Western alliance against Russia, calling the leaders of France and Canada.
The U.S. leader's 90-minute telephone call with Putin represented the kind of direct confrontation between the men who run the White House and the Kremlin rarely seen since the end of the Cold War some 25 years ago.
Obama also made it clear to Putin that his actions were a "breach of international law, including Russia's obligations under the UN Charter, and of its 1997 military basing agreement with Ukraine."
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