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By Alex Johnson
Ukraine summoned an emergency meeting Sunday of its war cabinet after accusing Russia of firing three of its ships in the Black Sea, injuring at least six sailors.
The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) confirmed that it had seized three "warships" from the Ukrainian Navy, claiming that they had entered Russian territorial waters. "Weapons were used to force Ukrainian warships to stop," the official Russian news agency TASS reported on Sunday.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said that he had mobilized all naval personnel and sent all his ships to sea after what he described as two gunboats and a tugboat attacked off the coast of Crimea , which Russia annexed in 2014.
Oleksii Makeiev, political director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, described the incident as "bellicose" that "undermines the security of the entire region"The country's National Security and Defense Council announced in a statement that the war cabinet would meet Sunday night to consider the imposition of martial law.
The seizure of warships by Russia would represent an escalation of tensions that had erupted a few hours earlier when it was blocking all traffic under the Crimean Bridge in the Kerch Strait – the only passage in the sea of 39; Azov – because of what she said was an approach to Ukrainian ships, said TASS.
The FSB said that Ukraine had not informed Russia that its vessels were planning to use the Strait, an assertion that Ukraine denied. While Ukraine and Russia have rights to the sea under a 2003 treaty, Russia controls both sides of the Strait.
"Ships are performing dangerous maneuvers and disobeying the requirements of the Russian authorities," the FSB's border service said in a statement. "Border services shall take all necessary measures to ensure the safety of navigation and the regulation of maritime traffic in the waters of the Black Sea and the Azov Sea as well as in the Strait of Kerch."
The government of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has called Russian actions "an act of aggression aimed at deliberately aggravating the situation in the waters of the Azov and Kerch Strait".
"We are appealing to the entire pro-Ukrainian coalition: we must remain united!" Poroshenko said Sunday on Twitter.
NATO is closely following the situation and has called for restraint, said Oana Lungescu, a spokeswoman for NATO.
"NATO fully supports the sovereignty of Ukraine and its territorial integrity, including its rights of navigation in its territorial waters," she said in a statement. "We call on Russia to guarantee unimpeded access to the Ukrainian ports of the Azov Sea, in accordance with international law."
Likewise, the European Union has stated that it expects Russia to "restore freedom of passage in the Straits of Kerch" and urges "all to act with the utmost restraint." immediately defuse the situation. "
"The EU does not recognize and will not recognize the illegal annexation of the Crimean peninsula by Russia," the union said in a statement.
The United States and Russia clashed in July after the White House rejected Russian President Vladimir Putin's proposal to hold a referendum on the country's independence in the east of the country. Ukraine with a separatist tendency.
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