Obama Slams Russia 'Aggression' in Europe, Acknowledges U.S. 'Racial Tensions'
U.S. President Barack Obama denounced Russian aggression in Europe at the United Nations on Wednesday, but proffered a hand to Moscow by offering to lift sanctions if Russia changes course.
"Russian aggression in Europe recalls the days when large nations trampled small ones in pursuit of territorial ambition," Obama told the General Assembly with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in the audience.
"Russia's actions in Ukraine challenge this post-war order," said Obama, denouncing Crimea's annexation by Moscow and Russian support for armed separatists in Ukraine.
"We will impose a cost on Russia for aggression," he said. But the U.S. president said a recent ceasefire agreement in Ukraine offers an opening towards diplomacy and peace.
"If Russia takes that path -- a path that for stretches of the post-Cold War period resulted in prosperity for the Russian people -- then we will lift our sanctions and welcome Russia's role in addressing common challenges."
He said Russia and the United States had cooperated in the past, from reducing nuclear stockpiles to removing and destroying Syria's declared chemical weapons.
"And that’s the kind of cooperation we are prepared to pursue again -- if Russia changes course," Obama said.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon alluded in his own speech to East-West tensions over Ukraine, saying that "Cold War ghosts have returned to haunt our times."
Obama's remarks left Lavrov unimpressed.
"The sanctions are the United States' own business," Interfax quoted Lavrov as telling Russian reporters.
"But the things happening in Ukraine are not their business at all."
Separately, Obama acknowledged that the United States had its own racial and ethnic tensions.
The killing in August of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer in the St Louis suburb of Ferguson led to nightly protests and prompted a national debate about race and law enforcement.
The U.S. Justice Department has also launched a broad civil rights probe into the actions of the police department in the Missouri town.
"I realize that America's critics will be quick to point out that at times we too have failed to live up to our ideals; that America has plenty of problems within our own borders. This is true," Obama said.
"In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson," he said.
"So yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions. And like every country, we continually wrestle with how to reconcile the vast changes wrought by globalization and greater diversity with the traditions that we hold dear."
Some African-Americans feel they are victims of unfair racial profiling by law enforcement agencies, half a century after the civil rights movement and the end of official segregation.
There have been demands that the officer involved in Ferguson, Darren Wilson, be put on trial for murder.
Police claim 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot after a struggle after he allegedly stole a box of cigars from a convenience store.
But some witnesses in Ferguson -- a suburb of 21,000 with an African-American majority and an overwhelmingly white police department and town council -- say Brown had put his hands up to surrender when he was shot at least six times.
Source: Agence France Presse
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