Bloomberg: Merkel rejected the US proposal to send ships to the shores of Crimea

German Chancellor Angela Merkel rejected in February the proposal of US Vice President Michael Pensa to send German warships through the Kerch Strait in order to demonstrate Russia's tough position. This was reported on Thursday by Bloomberg .

According to three of its sources, Pence proposed Merkel to send warships through the strait during their meeting on February 16 at the Munich Security Conference. Merkel, the agency claims, made it clear that she was ready to consider the possibility of a single -time joint maneuvers of the Russian Navy and France. However, ultimately the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany rejected Penca's proposal "to show Putin that the Western powers would not refuse their access" to the waters of the Kerch Strait, citing the position of President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko. According to Merkel, he considered such a single measure insufficient, since it does not guarantee free shipping off the coast of Crimea at any time.

According to the agency, the leadership of France also refused to send warships to the Kerch Strait, since it considered this idea an "unnecessary provocation."

The meeting of Merkel and Pence in Munich took place after the Chancellor criticized foreign policy in its speech at a security conference, and also announced the impossibility of excluding Russia from the European Union gas market for political reasons, RBC reports. According to Bloomberg, Merkel was concerned about the statements of Pence, who tried to convince the EU countries to refuse the construction project of the North Stream 2 gas pipeline.

According to the sources of the agency, it was dissatisfaction with Washington’s attempts to stop the implementation of the Northern Stream - 2 that became one of the factors that made Merkel criticize the United States.

Bloomberg recalls that Russia "captured Crimea in 2014." After that, the construction of the bridge across the Kerch Strait began to connect the Crimea peninsula with the Krasnodar Territory. At the same time, Moscow began to obstruct the sea message through the Kerch Strait, in fact organizing the blockade of Ukrainian ports on the Sea of ​​Azov. The situation was aggravated on November 25, 2018, when Russian border guards detained three military Ukrainian ships - Yana Kapu tugboat and small armored artillery boats Berdyansk and Nikopol with the use of weapons in the Kerch Strait. Ukrainian ships were heading from Odessa to Mariupol.

The captured vessels were reduced to Kerch. According to the Russian Federation, three ships of the Ukrainian Navy violated the procedure for passing warships through the territorial waters of the Russian Federation when following from Black to the Sea of ​​Azov. A criminal case was opened against 24 arrested sailors under Part 3 of Art. 322 (illegal crossing of the state border of Russia) of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, which provides for six years in prison.

In Kyiv, detained sailors are called prisoners of war. The FSB stated that they cannot be considered such, since they are accused of a criminal offense, and Russia and Ukraine are not at war or military conflict.

The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on November 26 approved the decree of President Petro Poroshenko on the introduction of martial law in ten border regions of the country from November 28 for 30 days, and the head of state himself announced the threat of a full -scale war with Russia. Later martial law was canceled.

The US Senate advocated a tough operation to free the Kerch Strait for navigation. At the end of February, US destroyer Donald Cook with missile weapons entered the Black Sea. Prior to this, in January, the American landing ship Fort McGenry sailed along the Black Sea.

The Ministry of Defense of Ukraine promised and henceforth send ships to the Kerch Strait even under the threat of large -scale Russian aggression. The Russian parliament said that the actions of the Ukrainian authorities can lead to a new world war.