The United States and the European Union are expected on Monday to impose new sanctions on Russian individuals, sources said on Friday, as the Ukraine crisis escalated with armed pro-Russia separatists seizing a bus carrying international mediators, according to the Associated Press.
The Pentagon said Russian aircraft breached Ukraine's airspace several times over the past 24 hours, but did not offer more details, the AP reported.
Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steve Warren called on Russia to "take immediate steps to de-escalate the situation," according to the AP.
"People who come here as observers bringing with them a real spy: it's not appropriate," Vyacheslav Ponomaryov, separatist self-declared mayor of the east Ukraine city of Slaviansk, said, the AP reported.
The fresh U.S. and EU sanctions come in response to Russia's alleged efforts to destabilize eastern Ukraine, said sources familiar with the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity, according to the AP.
The EU is expected to name 15 previously unidentified individuals to be placed under sanctions and would focus on those it thinks are responsible for the unrest in Ukraine, the sources said, the AP reported.
The United States is expected to impose sanctions on entities and individuals, including "cronies" of Russian President Vladimir Putin, they said, according to the AP. The sources said the one thing that might prevent the EU and the United States from moving ahead with the sanctions on Monday would be a sudden reversal of what they say is Russian-sponsored separatist movements in eastern Ukraine.
Accusing the West of plotting to control Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov declared that pro-Russia insurgents in the country's east would only disarm and leave the territory they have occupied if the Ukrainian government clears out a protest camp in Kiev's Independence Square, known as the Maidan, and evicts activists from other occupied facilities, the AP reported.
"The West wants - and this is how it all began - to seize control of Ukraine because of their own political ambitions, not in the interests of the Ukrainian people," Lavrov said, according to the AP.
