WASHINGTON - President Obama condemned the latest Russian military advance into Ukraine on Thursday and said the United States and its allies would take further actions to punish Moscow for violating its neighbor's sovereignty, but he stopped short of calling it an invasion.
'My expectation is we will take additional steps primarily because we have not seen any meaningful action on the part of Russia to try to resolve this in a diplomatic fashion,' he told reporters in a news conference at the White House. 'The sanctions that we've already applied have been effective. Our intelligence shows the Russians know they've been effective.'
Grappling with multiple international crises, Mr. Obama also cautioned against expecting imminent American military strikes inside Syria targeting forces of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which has established a virtual state across the border of those two countries.
The president said he wanted to build a formidable international coalition before taking any action, and he made it clear that he was not close to settling on an approach.
'We don't have a strategy yet,' he said, before heading into a meeting with his national security advisers to discuss the situation there. 'Folks are getting a little further ahead of where we're at.'
The president's comments came at a time of heightened international tension that has consumed much of his time and attention, but the underlying message he seemed intent on sending was to urge caution in tackling them. He argued that there was no military solution to the crisis with ISIS or the confrontation with Russia.
He used the occasion to chastise regional allies in the Middle East for playing both sides when it comes to extremist groups like ISIS, and he said he was sending Secretary of State John Kerry to the region to assemble a consensus approach for rolling back the organization's gains. He also said that he had just spoken with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany about Russia and has invited Ukraine's new president, Petro O. Poroshenko, to visit him in Washington.
Mr. Obama declined to call the latest reports of Russian military units moving into Ukraine an invasion, as others have, saying they are 'not really a shift' but 'a little more overt' version of longstanding violations of Ukrainian sovereignty. 'I consider the actions that we've seen in the last week a continuation of what's been taking place for months now,' he said. 'These separatists are backed, trained, armed, financed by Russia. Throughout this process we've seen deep Russian involvement in everything that they've done.'
Mr. Obama's tone was strikingly more restrained than that of his ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, who earlier in the day bluntly accused Russia of lying about its military intervention in Ukraine. In a blistering statement to the Security Council, Ms. Power said 'the mask is coming off' Russia's actions, which she called 'a threat to all of our peace and security.'
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