World

MOSCOW — Russia on Saturday pledged it would not invade mainland Ukraine following its seizure of Crimea, favouring a federal solution for the ex-Soviet state as diplomacy with the West gathered momentum.

Tensions have run high since Moscow’s lightning takeover of Crimea from Ukraine, with the United States accusing Russia of massing tens of thousands of troops on Ukraine’s eastern border.

But signs of progress have appeared in efforts to temper the worst East-West crisis since the Cold War.

US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov pencilled in an impromptu meeting in Paris on Sunday in a further bid to resolve the stand-off following telephone talks between the Russian and American presidents.

Lavrov suggested Moscow’s main demands in the talks were that Ukraine should become a federation, commit to not joining NATO and restore order to cities after almost half a year of street protests.

Putin also told Obama that the problems surrounding the breakaway Moldovan region of Transdniestr — a Russian-speaking region seen by some as the Kremlin’s next target — should be solved not by force but by talks in the “5+2” format of Moldova, Transdniestr, the OSCE, Russia and Ukraine, with the EU and US as observers.

Ukraine is now at a crossroads after the fall of pro-Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych in February and the clock is ticking down to May 25 presidential elections which are expected to cement Kiev’s pro-West course.

With boxing champion turned politician Vitali Klitschko bowing out of the race, the overwhelming favourite to win the polls is pro-European confectionary tycoon Petro Poroshenko, although feisty former premier Yulia Tymoshenko is expected to mount an all-out campaign since declaring her candidacy this week.

‘No intention’ to invade

Lavrov said Moscow has no intention of ordering its armed forces to cross over the Ukrainian border and acknowledged the divisions between Moscow and the West on the crisis were narrowing.

“We have absolutely no intention and no interests in crossing the Ukrainian border,” he told Russian state television.

“We [Russia and the West] are getting closer in our positions,” he added, saying recent contacts had shown the outlines of a “possible joint initiative which could be presented to our Ukrainian colleagues,” he added.

Lavrov made clear Russia’s priorities for Ukraine were a federalisation which would allow the interests of everyone in Ukraine — including Russian speakers in the east and south — to be fully represented.

He said Kiev should also commit to being non-aligned — with Ukrainian NATO membership clearly a red line for Moscow.

“There should be no ambiguity here. There is too much ‘not for the time being’ and ‘we don’t intend’ [to join NATO]. Intentions change, but facts on the ground remain,” he said.

He said that the West was now “listening” to Russia’s idea of a federalised Ukraine and a federation [for Ukraine] “is far from being a forbidden word in our talks.”

However a clear solution remained elusive.

“There is no single plan,” RIA Novosti quoted Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov as saying. “We have differing views of the situation. Our discussions involve an exchange of ideas, but one cannot say that we have some sort of single approach.”

Lavrov-Kerry meeting

The United States and European Union clearly want Russia to de-escalate tensions by removing the troops said to be surrounding Ukraine’s eastern borders.

Kiev this week estimated there were now 100,000 Russian soldiers positioned around Ukraine — a figure neither confirmed nor denied by Moscow.

Putin and Obama had earlier discussed ways to solve the crisis in Ukraine, both the White House and the Kremlin said in separate statements, although neither side gave precise details on the nature of the plan on the table.

However, in a sign both sides feel there are grounds for discussion, Kerry decided mid-flight on a trip back from Riyadh to head to Paris and meet Lavrov.

Both the state department and Moscow confirmed the meeting would take place.

Russia is also feeling economic pressure, with the United States and European Union having already hit Moscow with sanctions against senior officials and markets worried about measures that could hurt the wider economy.

Moody’s put Russia’s credit rating on review for a possible downgrade on Friday, saying the current crisis “could significantly dampen investor sentiment for several years to come”.

Paving way for Poroshenko

Meanwhile, the race to take on the permanent role of Ukraine president became clearer as Klitschko announced he would not stand in the polls, leaving Poroshenko as the clear favourite in what could still be a tight race.

“We have to nominate a single candidate representing the democratic forces,” Klitschko told a congress of his UDAR [Punch] party.

“This has to be a candidate who enjoys the strongest public support. Today, this candidate in my opinion is Petro Poroshenko.”

This could give a clear run to Poroshenko, the only prominent Ukrainian businessman to back the protests against Yanukovych.

Tymoshenko, who was jailed under Yanukovych, has a lot of ground to make up to catch Poroshenko who leads in opinion polls but analysts see her as a wily campaigner who can make up ground.

SULTAN KUDARAT, Philippines — Joyous shouts of “Allahu Akbar” echoed across the headquarters of the Philippines’ biggest Muslim rebel group as a pact to end four decades of bloodshed was signed, but there were also fears war clouds had yet to pass.

The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) ended its rebellion on Thursday when its leaders signed a deal in Manila with the government that would create a new, autonomous Muslim homeland in the southern Philippines.

Various armed Muslim groups have been fighting since the 1970s for an independent Islamic state or autonomous rule in the south, which they regard as their ancestral home, and the conflict has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

MILF leader Murad Ebrahim said at the signing ceremony the accord was the “crowning glory” of his organisation’s struggle, and his troops at their main camp 900 kilometres  to the south voiced similar jubilation.

Hundreds of rebels, wearing camouflage uniforms and pointing assault rifles to the sky, shouted “Allahu Akbar”, or “God is great”, as they watched the historic moment on a television screen in a grassy field.

Senior MILF commander Usop Pasigan, 65, said he took up arms at the age of 17 and had lost three brothers in the fighting. Now he just wants to be a farmer and for his son to be able to live a normal life.

“I hope my boy will be able to finish college and not be an MILF fighter, like me,” Pasigan told AFP as he stood alongside many other elderly soldiers in their military fatigues.

For Jamira Mapagkasunggot, 56, a member of the MILF women’s auxiliary battalion, peace would mean being able to live without the constant fear of death.

“Most of the women have lost a father, a son or a nephew,” she told AFP at Camp Darapanan, where rebels and their families live inside a sprawling compound of coconut groves and corn fields.

Fears of more conflict 

But while Mapagkasunggot was optimistic about the process, she also acknowledged the many potential pitfalls that lay ahead.

“We fear some groups might not be supportive of these peace talks,” she said, referring to a wide range of smaller armed groups that roam the impoverished and often lawless southern Philippines that are opposed to the peace process.

Among them is the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF), which split from the MILF in 2008 because it wanted to continue pursuing independence.

The BIFF has just a few hundred militants, according to the military, but it has launched deadly attacks in the past to disrupt the peace process and has been able to withstand repeated government assaults against it.

“The war is not yet over. We are still here,” BIFF spokesman Abu Missry Mama told AFP by telephone from his secret base elsewhere in the south.

Another armed group not covered by the peace accord is Al Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf, which specialises in kidnapping for ransom, while the area is plagued by private armies of corrupt politicians who may resist the new government.

The MILF, which has about 10,000 fighters, has committed to working with the government to neutralise the threat of rogue groups such as the BIFF, meaning future battles against former comrades are possible.

Accord faces hurdles 

Meanwhile, there are doubts President Benigno Aquino’s administration will be able to fulfil its commitments in the accord.

Among the hurdles is securing approval from congress for a “Basic Law” that would create the autonomous region.

Without the law, the autonomous region cannot exist, but there are no guarantees that Aquino can secure majority support in congress for the highly sensitive issue.

As insurance, the MILF has said it will not reveal to the government the names of its fighters, or hand over its giant arsenal of weapons, until the law is passed and the autonomous region created.

The MILF leadership is also aware that other peace efforts have failed, leading to more conflict.

In 1996, another major rebel group, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), signed a peace deal with the government in return for the creation of a Muslim autonomous area.

But critics, including the MILF, said the autonomous area did not give Muslims enough powers.

Under the new peace deal, the new autonomous region would replace the old one, angering factions of the MNLF and opening another potential front for conflict.

MNLF founder Nur Misuari’s followers attacked the southern port city of Zamboanga in September last year in an effort to derail the peace talks.

The military responded with an unrelenting assault in which more than 100 MNLF fighters were killed.

In a speech at the signing ceremony, Aquino cited the September clashes as he warned he was prepared to unleash his troops on any armed group opposed to the peace process.

“Those who want to test the resolve of the state will be met with a firm response based on righteousness and justice, as we demonstrated in Zamboanga,” Aquino said.

PERTH, Australia — A Chinese military plane scanning part of a search zone the size of Poland for signs of debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 spotted several objects floating in the sea on Saturday, including two bearing colours of the missing jet.

But it was not immediately clear whether the objects were related to the three-week-old investigation, and the second day of searching in the area ended with no evidence found of the jet, officials said.

The Chinese Ilyushin IL-76 spotted three floating objects, China’s official Xinhua news agency said, a day after several planes and ships combing the newly targeted area closer to Australia saw several other objects.

Ships from China and Australia scooped up items described only as “objects from the ocean”, but none were “confirmed to be related” to Flight 370, said a statement from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is overseeing the search.

Relatives and friends of the passengers said they were tortured by the uncertainty over the fate of their loved ones, as they wait for hard evidence that the plane crashed.

“This is the trauma of maybe he’s dead, maybe he’s not. Maybe he’s still alive and we need to find him. Maybe he died within the first hour of the flight, and we don’t know,” Sarah Bajc, the American girlfriend of US passenger Philip Wood, said in Beijing.

“I mean, there’s absolutely no way for me to reconcile that in my heart,” she said.

The three objects spotted by the Chinese plane Saturday were white, red and orange in colour, the Xinhua report said. The missing Boeing 777’s exterior was red, white, blue and gray.

An Australian PC3 Orion search plane also sighted objects in a different part of the search area, but the maritime safety authority did not describe those objects in greater detail.

An image captured a day earlier by a New Zealand plane showed a white rectangular object floating in the sea, but it was not clear whether it was related to the missing jet or was just sea trash.

Flight 370 disappeared March 8 while bound from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and investigators have been puzzled over what happened aboard the plane, with speculation ranging from equipment failure and a botched hijacking to terrorism or an act by one of the pilots.

The latter was fuelled by reports that the pilot’s home flight simulator had files deleted from it, but Malaysian Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said checks, including one by the FBI, had turned up no new information.

“What I know is that there is nothing sinister from the simulators, but of course that will have to be confirmed by the chief of police,” he said.

Newly analysed satellite data shifted the search zone on Friday, raising expectations that searchers may be closer to getting physical evidence that the plane crashed in the Indian Ocean with 239 people aboard.

That would also help narrow the hunt for the wreckage and the plane’s black boxes, which could contain clues to what caused the plane to be so far off-course.

The US navy has already sent equipment that can detect pings from the back boxes, and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott told reporters in Sydney that the equipment would be put on an Australian naval ship soon.

“It will be taken to the most prospective search area and if there is good reason to deploy it, it will be deployed,” he said, without giving a time frame. Other officials have said it could take days for the ship — the Ocean Shield — to reach the search area.

The newly targeted zone is nearly 1,130 kilometres northeast of sites the searchers have crisscrossed for the past week. The redeployment came after analysts determined that the Boeing 777 may have been travelling faster than earlier estimates and would, therefore, have run out of fuel sooner.

The new search area is closer to Perth than the previous one, with a flying time of 2 1/2 hours each way, allowing for five hours of search time, according to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.

AMSA said five P-3 Orions — three from Australia and one each from Japan and New Zealand — plus a Japanese coast guard jet, the Chinese Ilyushin IL-76, and one civilian jet acting as a communications relay took part Saturday.

“The weather in the area was reasonably good — most of the area we were able to see four or five kilometres or more,” Royal Australian Air Force Flight Lt. Russell Adams said. “The sea state was up, however, which meant there were quite a few whitecaps in the area so the crew would have had a bit of difficulty discerning between objects in the water and the whitecaps, so it made it hard for the guys today.”

Some family members in Beijing said they want to fly to Kuala Lumpur to seek more answers from the government, but an airline representative said it may have to wait a day because of a lack of hotel space this weekend because of the Formula One Malaysian Grand Prix race on Sunday.

Steve Wang, a representative of some of the Chinese families in Beijing, said about 50 relatives wanted to go to Malaysia because they were not happy with the responses given by Malaysian government representatives in China.

“Because they sent a so-called high-level group to meet us, but they have not been able to answer all our questions,” he said. “It’s either they are not in charge of a certain aspect of work or that it’s still being investigated, or it’s not convenient for them to comment.”

Malaysia Airlines’ commercial director, Hugh Dunleavy, said Saturday in Beijing that the airline was trying to facilitate the relatives’ travel to Kuala Lumpur, but that plans had not been confirmed because of the difficulties in booking hotels this weekend.

If investigators can determine that the plane went down in the newly targeted zone — which spans about 319,000 square kilometres — recovery of its flight data and cockpit voice recorders could be complicated.

Much of the sea floor in the area is about 2,000 metres below the surface, but depths may reach a maximum of about 6,000 metres at its easternmost edge.

The hunt for the plane focused first on the Gulf of Thailand, along the plane’s planned path. But when radar data showed it had veered sharply west, the search moved to the Andaman Sea, off the western coast of Malaysia, before pivoting to the southern Indian Ocean, southwest of Australia.

MANILA — The biggest Muslim rebel group in the Philippines signed an historic pact Thursday to end one of Asia’s longest and deadliest conflicts, promising to give up their arms for an autonomous homeland.

Following four decades of fighting that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) signed the peace deal with President Benigno Aquino’s government at a high-profile ceremony in Manila.

“The comprehensive agreement on Bangsamoro is the crowning glory of our struggle,” MILF Chairman Murad Ebrahim said at the signing ceremony, using a local term that refers to a Muslim homeland.

“With this agreement the legitimate aspirations of the Bangsamoro and the commitment of the government of the Philippines to recognise those aspirations are now sealed.”

The pact makes the MILF and the government partners in a plan to create a southern autonomous region for the Philippines’ Muslim minority with locally elected leaders by mid-2016.

“What is being presented before us now is a path that can lead to a permanent change in Muslim Mindanao,” Aquino said at the ceremony, attended by more than 1,000 people.

The Bangsamoro region would cover about 10 per cent of territory in the mainly Catholic Philippines. The planned region has a majority of Muslims, but there are clusters of Catholic-dominated communities.

Muslim rebels have been battling since the 1970s for independence or autonomy in the southern islands of the Philippines, which they regard as their ancestral homeland dating back to when Arabic traders arrived there in the 13th Century.

The conflict has condemned millions of people across large parts of the resource-rich Mindanao region to brutal poverty, plagued by Muslim and Christian warlords as well as outbreaks of fighting that has led to mass displacements.

The conflict and poverty have also been fertile conditions for Islamic extremism, with Al Qaeda linked Abu Sayyaf group and other hardline militants making remote regions of Mindanao their strongholds.

The MILF, which the military estimates has 10,000 fighters, is easily the biggest Muslim rebel group in Mindanao, and the political settlement was greeted with relief and optimism in the south.

“I am really happy. In the face of all the hardship of our parents, we the next generation hope and pray that Christians and Muslims will have peace,” Mona Rakman, 42, a mother of four who lives close to the MILF headquarters, told AFP.

The autonomous region would have its own police force, a regional parliament and power to levy taxes, while revenues from the region’s vast deposits of natural resources would be split with the national government.

It would have a secular government, rather than being an Islamic state. The national government would retain control over defence, foreign policy, currency and citizenship.

There are about 10 million Muslims in the Philippines, roughly 10 per cent of the population, according to government statistics. Most live in the south of the country.

However, there are no guarantees the peace deal will be implemented by the middle of 2016, a crucial deadline as that is when Aquino is required by the constitution to end his six-year term.

Aquino needs to convince Congress to pass a “basic law” to create the Bangsamoro autonomous region, ideally by the end of this year to allow time for other steps such as a local plebiscite.

But even though Aquino’s ruling coalition has a loose majority and he enjoys record-high popularity ratings, there are concerns politicians could reject or water down the proposed law.

Powerful Christian politicians in Mindanao are regarded as potential deal breakers, while others elsewhere may see political advantage in opposing the deal to appeal to some Catholics ahead of the 2016 national elections.

The deal is also likely to be challenged in the Supreme Court, which in 2008 struck down a planned peace deal the MILF had negotiated with Aquino’s predecessor, Gloria Arroyo.

Islamic militants opposed to the peace deal are another threat, and could continue to create enduring violence in Mindanao.

Among the potential spoilers is the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters, an MILF splinter group of a few hundred militants that has carried out deadly attacks in the south in recent years.

“We will continue to fight against the government of the Republic of the Philippines because we are for independence and nothing else,” BIFF spokesman Abu Missry Mama told AFP by phone from his southern hideout.

The MILF leadership has committed to working with the government to neutralise the threat of the BIFF.

However, the MILF will not give up its arms or the identities of its fighters until the basic law has been passed, highlighting the fragility of Thursday’s peace deal.

PERTH, Australia — Thunderstorms and gale-force winds grounded the international air search for wreckage from Flight MH370 on Thursday, frustrating the effort yet again as Thailand reported a satellite sighting of hundreds of floating objects.

The Thai report was the second in two days suggesting a possible debris field in the stormy southern Indian Ocean from the crashed jet.

But an international air and sea search has frustratingly failed so far to secure wreckage confirmed to have come from the Malaysia Airlines passenger plane, which went missing on March 8 with 239 people on board.

Planes and ships have faced fierce winds and sometimes mountainous seas as they hunt for hard evidence that the plane crashed, as Malaysia has concluded.

On Tuesday, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) called off both the air and sea search.

The agency on Thursday cancelled the air search because of worsening weather after it had got under way, but said ships would stay and try to continue.

“Bad weather expected for next 24 hours,” it tweeted.

Thailand’s Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency said it had satellite images taken on Monday of 300 objects, ranging from two to 15 metres in size.

It said they were scattered over an area about 2,700 kilometres southwest of Perth, but could not confirm they are plane debris.

The agency said the objects were spotted about 200 kilometres away from an area where French satellite images earlier showed objects.

Malaysia had said late Wednesday that those images taken Sunday showed 122 floating objects.

The Boeing 777 is presumed to have crashed on March 8 in the Indian Ocean after mysteriously diverting from its Kuala Lumpur-Beijing path and apparently flying for hours in the opposite direction.

Malaysia believes the plane was deliberately redirected by someone on board, but nothing else is known.

AMSA had said earlier the French satellite images were in an area authorities have pinpointed as a potential crash zone some 2,500 kilometres southwest of Perth.

Six military planes from Australia, China, Japan and the United States had been set to fly sorties throughout Thursday, along with five civil aircraft, scouring two areas covering a cumulative 78,000 square kilometres.

Five ships from Australia and China also were set to resume searching the zone.

Clock ticks on black box 

The search suspensions caused mounting concern as the clock ticks on the signal emitted by the plane’s “black box” of flight data.

The data is considered vital to unravelling the flight’s mystery but the signal, aimed at guiding searchers to the device on the seabed where it hopefully can be recovered, will expire in under two weeks.

The drama is playing out in a wild expanse of ocean described by Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott as “about as close to nowhere as it’s possible to be”.

The French images provided by European aerospace giant Airbus depicted some objects as long as 23 metres, Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said.

Seeking closure, anguished families of those aboard are desperately awaiting hard evidence, which the aviation industry hopes can also provide clues to what caused one of aviation’s greatest mysteries.

US law firm Ribbeck Law Chartered International fired the first salvo Wednesday in an expected barrage of lawsuits on behalf of grieving families. The firm is targeting Malaysia Airlines and Boeing.

“We are going to be filing the lawsuits for millions of dollars per each passenger based on prior cases that we have done involving crashes like this one,” the firm’s head of aviation litigation, Monica Kelly, told reporters in Kuala Lumpur.

A separate statement by the firm, which filed an initial court petition in the US state of Illinois on Tuesday, said the two companies “are responsible for the disaster of Flight MH370”.

Malaysia Airlines has declined detailed comment.

Malaysia’s government said this week that satellite data indicated the plane plunged into the sea, possibly after running out of fuel.

‘Appalling’ handling 

MH370 relatives have endured more than a fortnight of agonising uncertainty.

Two-thirds of the passengers were from China, and relatives there have criticised Malaysia in acid terms, accusing the government and airline of a cover-up and botching the response.

The sister of New Zealand victim Paul Weeks lashed out Thursday.

“The whole situation has been handled appallingly, incredibly insensitively,” Sara Weeks told Radio Live in New Zealand.

“The Malaysian government, the airline, it’s just all been incredibly poor.”

Scores of Chinese relatives protested outside Malaysia’s embassy in Beijing on Tuesday, and a day later Premier Li Keqiang urged Malaysia to involve “more Chinese experts” in the investigation.

While Malaysia believes the plane was deliberately diverted, other scenarios include a hijacking, pilot sabotage or a crisis that incapacitated the crew and left the plane to fly on autopilot until it ran out of fuel.

Focus has also been on the pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, with the FBI Wednesday saying it was close to completing an analysis of data from a flight simulator taken from his home.

Malaysian authorities had sought FBI help to recover files deleted from the hard drive.

So far, no information implicating the captain or anyone else has emerged.

ISTANBUL — Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan described the leaking on YouTube on Thursday of a recording of top security officials discussing possible military operations in Syria as “villainous” and the government blocked access to the video-sharing site.

The anonymous posting followed similar releases on social media in recent weeks which Erdogan has cast as a plot orchestrated by political enemies to unseat him ahead of March 30 elections. But it took the campaign to a higher level, impinging on the most sensitive areas of national security.

An anonymous YouTube account posted what it presented as a recording of intelligence chief Hakan Fidan discussing possible military operations in Syria with Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Deputy Chief of military Staff Yasar Guler and other top officials.

“They even leaked a national security meeting. This is villainous, this is dishonesty...Who are you serving by doing audio surveillance of such an important meeting?” Erdogan declared before supporters at a rally ahead of March 30 local polls that will be a key test of his support amid a corruption scandal.

The foreign ministry described the leak as a “wretched attack” on national security and said those behind it would receive the heaviest punishment. It said some sections of the recording had been manipulated. Reuters was unable to verify the authenticity of the recordings.

The conversation appears to centre on a possible operation to secure the tomb of Suleyman Shah, grandfather of the founder of the Ottoman Empire, in an area of northern Syria largely controlled by militant Islamists.

Ankara regards the tomb as sovereign Turkish territory under a treaty signed with France in 1921, when Syria was under French rule. About two dozen Turkish special forces soldiers permanently guard it.

‘National security issue’

Turkey threatened two weeks ago to retaliate for any attack on the tomb following clashes between militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), an Al Qaeda breakaway group and rival rebel groups in the area, east of Aleppo near the Turkish border.

“An operation against ISIL has international legitimacy. We will define it as Al Qaeda. There are no issues on the Al Qaeda framework. When it comes to the Suleyman Shah tomb, it’s about the protection of national soil,” a voice presented as that of foreign ministry undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioglu says.

When the discussion turns to the need to justify such an operation, the voice purportedly of Fidan says: “Justification can be created. The matter is to create the will.”

The Turkish telecoms authority TIB said it had taken an “administrative measure” against YouTube, a week after it blocked access to microblogging site Twitter.

A source in Erdogan’s office said the video sharing service was blocked as a precaution after the voice recordings created a “national security issue” and said it may lift the ban if YouTube agreed to remove the content.

Google said it was looking into reports that some users in Turkey were unable to access its video-sharing site YouTube, saying there was no technical problem on its side.

KIEV — Western nations rushed to help Ukraine on Thursday, with the International Monetary Fund pledging up to $18 billion in loans, the UN condemning the vote that drove Crimea into Russian hands and the US Congress considering even harsher sanctions against Russia.

Yet even with such intensive help to prop up Ukraine’s teetering economy, the prime minister warned that all residents are going to feel pain from the necessary financial reforms ahead — and home energy prices are certain to rise quickly.

And if that wasn’t enough, former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko — one of the country’s most polarising figures — said she will run for president in the May 25 vote. The announcement is sure to usher in strong emotions in Ukraine’s turbulent politics.

Russia, for its part, shrugged off the spotlight that was on Ukraine and the torrent of criticism directed at its annexation of Crimea. President Vladimir Putin’s government announced it would set up its own payment system to rival Visa and MasterCard after the two companies pulled their services from some Russian banks in the wake of international sanctions.

Speaking in Rome, President Barack Obama called the swell of support a “concrete signal of how the world is united with Ukraine”.

“The decision to go forward with an IMF programme is going to require a lot of courage,” Obama said. “It will require some tough decisions.”

In a lengthy, passionate address to parliament in Kiev, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk warned that Ukraine was “on the brink of economic and financial bankruptcy” and laid out the fixes needed to put the country back on track.

“The time has come to tell the truth, to do difficult and unpopular things,” Yatsenyuk said, adding that Ukraine was short $25.8 billion — “equivalent to the entire state budget for this year”.

The IMF loan, which is expected to range between $14 billion and $18 billion, hinges on structural reforms that Ukraine has pledged to undertake.

Ukraine’s new government finds itself caught between the demands of international creditors and a restive population that has endured decades of economic stagnation, corruption and mismanagement. The reforms demanded by the IMF — which included raising taxes, freezing the minimum wage and hiking energy prices — will hit households hard and are likely to strain the interim government’s tenuous hold on power.

Ukraine, a nation of 46 million people, is battling to install a semblance of normalcy since President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in February after months of protests ignited by his decision to back away from closer relations with the EU and turn towards Russia. Over the last few weeks, an interim government has formed, Ukraine lost Crimea to Russia and further possible military incursions by Russia are feared.

“This is a kamikaze government that perfectly well understands that there is no other way to stabilise Ukraine,” said Viktor Zamyatin, analyst with the Kiev-based Razumkov Centre think tank. “The catastrophic state of Ukraine’s economy has forced the government’s hand.”

But he said it could pay a steep price.

“It is hard to explain to the voter that the worsening of the economy has happened not because of the revolution, but because of Viktor Yanukovych’s policies,” he said.

The UN General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a resolution condemning the referendum that led to annexation of the Crimean Peninsula as illegal. The vote Thursday was 100 in favor, 11 opposed and 58 abstentions.

Tymoshenko, who was released from jail last month following the overthrow of her fierce rival Yanukovych, is variously admired as an icon of democracy or detested as a self-promoting manipulator with a shady past.

This will be the 53-year-old’s second attempt to win the presidency. She narrowly lost to Yanukovych in 2010 and spent two years in jail on charges that many in the West considered politically tainted.

On Thursday, alluding to her time in jail, she declared she has earned the right to promise that she will combat corruption.

“I will be the candidate of Ukrainian unity,” Tymoshenko said. “The west and centre of Ukraine has always voted for me, but I was born in the east.”

Ukraine is politically divided, with western regions favoring closer ties to Europe and the east looking towards Russia. But the dire state of its economy is an unavoidable issue: Ukraine’s finance ministry has said it needs $35 billion over the next two years to avoid default.

The IMF said recent economic policies have drastically slowed Ukraine’s growth and brought foreign currency reserves to a “critically low level”.

“Ukraine’s macroeconomic imbalances became unsustainable over the past year,” the IMF said.

One immediate reform will be to let gas prices for households float up to become more in line with market prices. Ukraine for years has relied on discounted gas from Russia and then subsidized that further, so that residents are used to extremely low energy prices. Russia has abandoned the discounts and Ukraine’s government cannot afford the extra subsidy anymore.

State energy company Naftogaz announced this week that household gas prices would rise 50 per cent beginning May 1 to make utility costs economically viable for the state by 2018. Yatsenyuk said the number of households getting state energy subsidies would rise from 1.4 million to four million.

He also announced layoffs for 10 per cent of Ukraine’s civil servants, or 24,000 workers.

Other donors, including the European Union and Japan, have already pledged further aid to Ukraine, conditional on the IMF bailout and reform package. The total amount of international assistance will be about $27 billion over the next two years.

Separately, the 28-nation EU has prepared a wider aid package including loans and grants for Ukraine expected to total more than $10 billion over the coming years.

Ukraine has historically had a fraught relationship with the IMF and failed to keep to the terms of earlier bailouts in 2008 and 2010. Such recalcitrance is seen as less probable this time around, although doubts persist.

“Given the volatile political situation, the prospect of a change in president following elections on May 25, and Ukraine’s track record with the IMF, there will still be many doubts about whether politicians will be able or willing to push through more substantial changes,” wrote William Jackson, an analyst at Capital Economics research company.

BRUSSELS/MOSCOW — The United States and the European Union agreed on Wednesday to work together to prepare possible tougher economic sanctions in response to Russia’s behaviour in Ukraine, including on the energy sector, and to make Europe less dependent on Russian gas.

US President Barack Obama said after a summit with top EU officials that Russian President Vladimir Putin had miscalculated if he thought he could divide the West or count on its indifference over his annexation of Crimea.

Leaders of the Group of Seven major industrial powers decided this week to hold off on sanctions targeting Moscow’s economy unless Putin took further action to destabilise Ukraine or other former Soviet republics.

“If Russia continues on its current course, however, the isolation will deepen, sanctions will increase and there will be more consequences for the Russian economy,” Obama told a joint news conference with European Council President Herman Van Rompuy and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.

He also said NATO should step up its presence in new east European member states bordering on Russia and Ukraine to provide reassurance that the alliance’s mutual defence guarantee would protect them.

Russian forces in Crimea captured the last Ukrainian navy ship after firing warning shots and stun grenades, completing Moscow’s grip on military installations in the Black Sea peninsula. Kiev has ordered its forces to withdraw.

Western concern has focused on Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s eastern border amid Kremlin allegations of attacks on Russian speakers in that industrial region of the country.

But Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Wednesday it seemed likely that the firm Western response so far would stop Russia undertaking what he called “other acts of aggression and interference on the territory of Ukraine”.

The new Ukrainian authorities announced a radical 50 per cent increase in the price of domestic gas from May 1, meeting an unpopular condition for International Monetary Fund aid which Russian-backed President Viktor Yanukovych had refused before he was ousted last month.

Kiev is seeking $15-20 billion in IMF assistance to help stabilise its shattered economy. Russia has said it will increase the price it charges Ukraine for gas from April.

Develop your own

In response to EU pleas to expand US gas exports to Europe to reduce reliance on Russian supplies, Obama said a new transatlantic trade deal under negotiation would make it easier to licence such sales.

However, he said Europe should also look to develop its own energy resources — a veiled reference to environmental resistance to shale gas extraction and nuclear power — and not just count on America.

Russia provides around one third of the EU’s oil and gas and some 40 per cent of the gas is exported through Ukraine.

“You cannot just rely on other people’s energy, even if it has some costs, some downside,” the EU ambassador to Washington quoted Obama as telling his EU hosts over a working lunch.

The World Bank warned that the economic impact of annexing Crimea from Ukraine could drive Russia into a sharp recession this year even if the West stops short of trade sanctions.

A World Bank report on the Russian economy, compiled before the most recent evidence of the scale of capital flight, made clear Moscow was already set to pay a significant price in lost growth due to the most serious East-West confrontation since the end of the Cold War.

Gross domestic product could contract by as much as 1.8 per cent in 2014 if the crisis persists, it said. That high-risk forecast assumes that the international community would still refrain from trade sanctions.

“An intensification of political tension could lead to heightened uncertainties around economic sanctions and would further depress confidence and investment activities,” the World Bank said.

“We assume that political risks will be prominent in the short-term.”

Under a low-risk scenario, assuming only a short-lived impact from the crisis, GDP could grow by 1.1 per cent, just half the bank’s 2.2 per cent growth forecast published in December.

Russian stocks rebound

Russia is refusing to recognise the Kiev government chosen by parliament after the overthrow of Yanukovich on February 22 following months of street protests against his refusal to sign a pact on closer ties with the EU.

So far, the United States and the EU have imposed personal sanctions against Russian and Crimean officials involved in the seizure of the peninsula and Washington has slapped visa bans and asset freezes on senior business figures close to Putin.

Neutral Switzerland, one of the world’s major offshore banking centres, said it would take steps to ensure it was not used to circumvent those sanctions.

Russian markets and the rouble have been shaken, resulting in massive capital outflows, now estimated by the economy ministry at up to $70 billion in the first quarter alone compared with $63 billion in the whole of last year.

However, Russian stocks clawed back more ground on Wednesday and the rouble strengthened as a relief rally continued due to signs of an easing of tensions over Crimea. Russian assets have rallied as investors calculate that the annexation will not trigger more serious Western sanctions.

The Ukraine crisis has largely pushed aside strains in the US-EU relationship over last year’s disclosures of large-scale spying by Washington on European allies, which only drew a brief mention at the summit.

British Prime Minister David Cameron has led the charge for the adoption of technologies such as shale gas fracking in response to the Ukraine crisis.

“Some countries are almost 100 per cent reliant on Russian gas, so I think it is something of a wake-up call,” Cameron said on Tuesday.

He pointed to reserves of shale gas in southeastern Europe, Poland and England that could be extracted by the process of pumping liquids at high pressure into underground rock formations known as fracking, widespread in the United States.

Environmentalists say fracking is a threat to the water table and can cause earthquakes and landslides. Countries such as France and Bulgaria have banned it and others such as Britain and Poland have faced anti-fracking protests.

NEW YORK — Suleiman Abu Ghaith, a son-in-law of Osama Bin Laden, was found guilty of terrorism-related charges on Wednesday following a three-week trial that offered unusually vivid details of the former Al Qaeda leader’s actions in the days after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Abu Ghaith, 48, a Kuwait-born Muslim cleric, faces life in prison after a federal court jury in New York convicted him of conspiring to kill Americans, conspiring to provide material support for terrorists, and providing such support.

Jurors took just over one day to reach a verdict in a courtroom that is blocks from the site of the World Trade Centre destroyed in the hijacked plane attacks nearly 13 years ago.

Abu Ghaith’s court appointed lawyer, Stanley Cohen, said there were several issues he would raise on appeal. They include US District Judge Lewis Kaplan’s decision to bar testimony from Pakistan-born Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man the US government accuses of masterminding the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

“He was stoic, he was at ease,” Cohen said of Abu Ghaith’s reaction to the verdict. “I think he feels that it was impossible under the circumstances to receive a fair trial.”

The judge scheduled September 8 for sentencing.

Prosecutors had accused Abu Ghaith, one of the highest-profile Bin Laden advisers to face trial in a US civilian court, of acting as an Al Qaeda mouthpiece and using videotapes of his inflammatory rhetoric to recruit new fighters.

They also said Abu Ghaith knew in advance of an attempt to detonate a shoe bomb aboard an airplane by Briton Richard Reid in December 2001, citing in part an October 2001 video in which he warned Americans that the “storm of airplanes will not stop”.

Lawyers for Abu Ghaith said the prosecution was based on “ugly words and bad associations”, rather than actual evidence that the defendant knew of or joined plots against Americans.

US Attorney General Eric Holder, in a statement after the verdict, said it bolstered the argument that militants should be tried on terrorism charges in civilian courts, rather than as combatants in military commissions.

That sentiment was echoed by Karen Greenberg, the director of Fordham Law School’s Centre on National Security, who attended the trial.

“The federal courts are robust and can handle the numerous challenges that terror trials pose, including witnesses taking the stand and classified material,” she said on Wednesday.

Unexpected testimony

In a surprising move, Abu Ghaith testified in his own defence, denying he helped plot Al Qaeda attacks and claiming he never became a formal member of the group.

He described meeting Bin Laden inside a cave in Afghanistan hours after the September 11 attacks.

“We are the ones who did this,” Bin Laden told Abu Ghaith, according to the defendant’s testimony. Abu Ghaith said he learned of the attacks in news reports.

He said that night, Bin Laden asked him what he believed the United States’ response would be.

Abu Ghaith said he told Bin Laden that the United States would not rest until it had accomplished two goals: killing Bin Laden and overthrowing the Taliban government in Afghanistan.

“You’re being too pessimistic,” Bin Laden replied, according to Abu Ghaith.

The Taliban was in fact soon ousted by the US and its allies and bin Laden, a founder of al Qaeda, was killed by US forces in May 2011 at a hideout in Pakistan.

On the day after seeing Bin Laden and discussing the attacks, Abu Ghaith testified, he joined a meeting that included Al Qaeda’s inner circle: Bin Laden and two of his closest lieutenants, Egyptians Ayman Al Zawahiri and Mohammed Atef.

A few hours later, he recorded the first of several videos at Bin Laden’s request, declaring that the September 11 attacks were a “natural” result of the US policy toward Muslims worldwide.

But he denied that his intention was to speak or recruit for Al Qaeda. Instead, he claimed he was trying to exhort all Muslims to stand up against oppression.

Abu Ghaith married Bin Laden’s daughter Fatima years after the September 11 attacks, a fact that was kept from the jury.

Abu Ghaith’s lawyers repeatedly sought to introduce testimony from accused plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed stating that Abu Ghaith had no involvement in al Qaeda’s military planning. The judge rejected those requests, finding that Mohammed, now a prisoner in the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, did not appear to have personal knowledge to back up his claims.

Defence lawyer Cohen also faulted Kaplan for telling the jury on Wednesday morning that he might keep them deliberating past day’s end if they had not reached a verdict by then, calling it “coercive”.

“It sends a message that in the court’s mind this is a no-brainer,” Cohen said.

As in several other terrorism trials held in US civilian courts, the jury remained anonymous.

KUALA LUMPUR — A French satellite scanning the Indian Ocean for remnants of a missing jetliner found a possible plane debris field containing 122 objects, a top Malaysian official said Wednesday, calling it “the most credible lead that we have”.

Defence Minister Hishammuddin Hussein also expressed exasperation with the anger rising among missing passengers’ relatives in China, who berated Malaysian government and airline officials earlier in the day in Beijing. About two-thirds of the missing are Chinese, but Hishammuddin pointedly said that Chinese families “must also understand that we in Malaysia also lost our loved ones” as did “so many other nations”.

Nineteen days into the search for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, the latest satellite images are the first to suggest that a debris field from the plane — rather than just a few objects — may be floating in the southern Indian Ocean, though no wreckage has been confirmed. Previously, an Australian satellite detected two large objects and a Chinese satellite detected one.

All three finds were made in roughly the same area, far southwest of Australia, where a desperate, multinational hunt has been going on for days.

Clouds obscured the latest satellite images, but dozens of objects could be seen in the gaps, ranging in length from one metre to 23 metres. At a news conference in Kuala Lumpur, Hishammuddin said some of them “appeared to be bright, possibly indicating solid materials.”

The images were taken Sunday and relayed by French-based Airbus Defence and Space, a division of Europe’s Airbus Group; its businesses include the operation of satellites and satellite communications. The company said in a statement that it has mobilised five observation satellites, including two that can produce very high resolution images, to help locate the plane.

Various floating objects have been spotted in the area by planes over the last week, including on Wednesday, when the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said three more objects were seen. The authority said two objects seen from a civil aircraft appeared to be rope, and that a New Zealand military plane spotted a blue object.

None of the objects were seen on a second pass, a frustration that has been repeated several times in the hunt for Flight 370, missing since March 8 with 239 people aboard.

Australian officials did not say whether they received the French imagery in time for search planes out at sea to look for the possible debris field, and did not return repeated phone messages seeking further comment.

It remains uncertain whether any of the objects seen came from the plane; they could have come from a cargo ship or something else.

The search resumed Wednesday after fierce winds and high waves forced crews to take a break Tuesday. A total of 12 planes and five ships from the United States, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand were participating in the search, hoping to find even a single piece of the jet that could offer tangible evidence of a crash and provide clues to find the rest of the wreckage.

Malaysia announced Monday that a mathematical analysis of the final known satellite signals from the plane showed that it had crashed in the sea, killing everyone on board.

The new data greatly reduced the search zone, but it remains huge — an area estimated at 1.6 million square kilometres, about the size of Alaska.

“We’re throwing everything we have at this search,” Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott told Nine Network television on Wednesday.

“This is about the most inaccessible spot imaginable. It’s thousands of kilometres from anywhere,” he later told Seven Network television. He vowed that “we will do what we can to solve this riddle”.

Malaysia has been criticised over its handling of the search, though it is one of the most perplexing mysteries in aviation history. Much of the most strident criticism has come from relatives of the 153 Chinese missing, some of whom expressed outrage that Malaysia essentially declared their loved ones dead without recovering a single piece of wreckage.

At a hotel banquet room in Beijing on Wednesday, a delegation of Malaysian government and airline officials explained what they knew to relatives of those lost. They were met with scepticism and even ridicule by some of the roughly 100 people in audience, who questioned some of the report’s findings, including how investigators could have concluded the direction and speed of the plane. One man later said he wanted to pummel everyone in the Malaysian delegation.

“Time will heal emotions that are running high. We fully understand,” Hishammuddin said in Kuala Lumpur.

“For the Chinese families, they must also understand that we in Malaysia also lost our loved ones. There are so many other nations that have lost their loved ones,” Hishammuddin said. “I have seen some images coming from Australia, very rational. [They] understand that this is a global effort. Not blaming directly on Malaysia, because we are coordinating something that is unprecedented.”

But one of the main complaints from families — mixed messages from Malaysia — continued Wednesday. Two days after Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said there were no survivors, Hishammuddin allowed for the possibility that some people aboard the plane might still be alive.

“If [the debris] is confirmed to be from MH370, then we can move on to deep sea surveillance search and rescue, hopefully, hoping against hope,” he said.

China dispatched a special envoy to Kuala Lumpur, Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Yesui, who met Najib and other top officials Wednesday, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

China, which now has Chinese warships and an icebreaker in the search zone, has been intent on supporting the interests of the Chinese relatives of passengers, backing their demands for detailed information on how Malaysia concluded the jet went down — details Hishamuddin said Malaysia handed over on Wednesday.

China’s support for families is the likely reason why authorities there — normally extremely wary of any spontaneous demonstrations that could undermine social stability — permitted a rare protest Tuesday outside the Malaysian embassy in Beijing, during which relatives chanted slogans, threw water bottles and briefly tussled with police who kept them separated from a swarm of journalists.

Though officials believe they know roughly where the plane is, it remains unknown why it disappeared shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur. Investigators have ruled out nothing — including mechanical or electrical failure, hijacking, sabotage, terrorism or issues related to the mental health of the pilots or someone else on board.

The search for the wreckage and the plane’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders will be a major challenge. It took two years to find the black box from Air France Flight 447, which went down in the Atlantic Ocean on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009, and searchers knew within days where that crash site was.

Wednesday’s search focused on an 80,000 square kilometre  swath of ocean about 2,000km southwest of Perth.

There is a race to find Flight 370’s black boxes, whose battery-powered “pinger” could stop sending signals within two weeks.

On Wednesday, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is coordinating the southern search operation on Malaysia’s behalf, said a US Towed Pinger Locator arrived in Perth along with a Bluefin-21 underwater drone. The equipment will be fitted to the Australian naval ship the Ocean Shield, but AMSA could not say when they would be deployed.

Kerry Sieh, the director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore, said the seafloor in the search area is relatively flat, with dips and crevices similar to the part of the Atlantic Ocean where the Air France wreckage was found.

He believes any large pieces of the plane would likely stay put once they have completely sunk. But recovering any part of the plane will be tough because of ocean depths in the search area, which are mostly 3,000 to 4,500 metres.

Aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas, publisher of Airlineratings.com, called the search “the most complex, the most difficult in aviation history”.

“The weather in this part of the world is far more difficult than that experienced in the search for [Air France] 447.”

He said huge swells were common, particularly during the southern hemisphere’s upcoming winter. “There’s a real urgency to find something as quickly as possible because through the winter months, they’ll probably have to suspend the search.”

Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology warned that the weather was expected to deteriorate again Thursday, with thunderstorms, low clouds and strong winds on the way.