Russia will not be pushed out of Ukraine's Crimea region by military means but, if the West stays united, Russians will realise they cannot achieve security through brute force, U.S. President Barack Obama said on Wednesday.
Obama, in a speech in Brussels, said the Ukraine crisis showed the United States and Europe were again confronted with the belief that bigger nations can bully smaller ones.
Russia would not be "dislodged from Crimea or deterred from further escalation by military force. But with time, so long as we remain united, the Russian people will recognize that they cannot achieve security, prosperity, and the status they seek through brute force," he said.
If Russia stayed on its current course, its isolation would only deepen and sanctions would expand, Obama said, adding that the Ukraine crisis did not mark the start of another Cold War.
Earlier, Russia accused Ukrainian officials of barring crews of Russian commercial airlines from going outside their planes in Ukrainian airports.
Tensions between Moscow and Kiev have been rising since Russian forces occupied the Crimean Peninsula and stayed there throughout the referendum earlier this month where votes overwhelmingly supported Russia's annexation.
Russia's foreign ministry said in a statement that Ukrainian border guards have been forcing cabin crews of Aeroflot, the state-controlled Russian airline, to stay inside their planes. The ministry said the decision violates international law and ultimately "poses a threat to the safety of civil aviation" because the crews cannot rest properly.
The ministry said that it had sent protest notes twice to the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow.
Russian authorities previously complained that Ukrainian border guards have singled out Russian men at the frontier and blocked their crossing, fearing that they may be activists coming to stir up unrest.
Ukrainian soldiers on Tuesday began their westward journey from Crimea after Ukraine's fledging government ordered the withdrawal of its troops from the Black Sea peninsula.
Germany:
The German government has cautioned against the use of violent language in the Ukraine crisis in response to reports that the former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko said in a leaked phone call that the Russian minority should be "nuked".
"Despite all the opposition to Russia's actions in Crimea and all differences of opinion even of a fundamental kind, there are limits to language and thought that must not be crossed," said Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert.
"Images of violence and fantasies of violence clearly cross that line by a long way," he told news conference on Wednesday, in response to a question.
Tymoshenko, who was imprisoned under pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovich and released after he was ousted in February, has confirmed the phone call took place but says a reference to the 8 million Russians living in Ukraine was manipulated.
REUTERS/AP