Obama Won’t Call Russia’s Move into Ukraine an ‘Invasion’

BARACK OBAMA: "I consider the actions that we’ve seen in the last week a continuation of what’s been taking place for months now. As I said in my opening statement, there is no doubt that this is not a homegrown indigenous uprising in Eastern Ukraine. The separatists are backed, trained, armed, financed by Russia. Throughout this process, we’ve seen deep Russian involvement in everything that they’ve done. I think in part because of the progress that you had seen by the Ukrainians around Donetsk and Luhansk, Russia determined that it had to be a little more overt in what it had already been doing, but it’s not really a shift. What we have seen though is that president Putin and Russia have repeatedly passed by potential off-ramps to resolve this diplomatically. And so, in our consultations with the — our European allies and partners, my expectation is that we will take additional steps, primarily because we have not seen any meaningful action on the part of Russia to actually try to resolve this in diplomatic fashion."