U.S. Secretary of State Kerry shakes hands wtih people as he stands not far from a barricade at the Shrine of the Fallen in central Kiev.
Beleaguered Ukraine got some U.S. help Tuesday - a $1 billion energy subsidy package and a bouquet of roses.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry delivered the flowers himself, laying them at the spot in Kiev that was the epicenter of the revolt against Moscow-backed President Viktor Yanukovych.
'We will be helping,' Kerry told the crowd on Institutska Street, which was still littered with barbed wire and barricades from last month's demonstrations. 'We are helping. President Obama is planning more assistance.'
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Kerry also urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to pull his troops out of the strategic Crimean peninsula.
'It is clear that Russia has been working hard to create a pretext for being able to invade further,' he said. 'It is not appropriate to invade a country, and at the end of a barrel of a gun dictate what you are trying to achieve. That is not 21st-century, G-8, major nation behavior.'
In Washington, the Obama administration announced the $1 billion energy subsidy aimed at shoring up Ukraine's interim government.
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And President Obama warned Putin against gobbling up any more Ukrainian territory.
'More and more people around the world deeply believe in, the principle that a sovereign people, an independent people, are able to make their own decisions about their own lives,' Obama said. 'Mr. Putin can throw a lot of words out there, but the facts on the ground indicate that right now he is not abiding by that principle.'
Washington has already announced plans to take economic and diplomatic steps aimed at punishing Putin.
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The Pentagon has already canceled a joint naval exercise with Russia that was planned for May. But there has been no talk of U.S. military intervention in the crisis.
Brooklyn city councilman Mark Treyger, whose parents emigrated from Ukraine, said he hopes 'the U.S. administration is acting with more than just words.'
'There's a large population of Ukrainian people, people of Ukrainian descent in south Brooklyn,' he said. 'Everyone here is closely following the news. Everyone does not want this to resort to violence.'
In his first public comments on the crisis, Putin spun his own version of what happened in Ukraine and called the ouster of Yanukovych an 'unconstitutional coup.'
Putin accused the U.S. of provoking the putsch and treating Ukrainians like 'lab rats.' He claimed Yanukovych requested Russian intervention and refused to recognize Ukraine's interim government.
Ominously, Putin held out the possibility of Russian troops moving beyond Crimea into the eastern parts of Ukraine, where ethnic Russians are the majority, if 'lawlessness' spreads.
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'Even if I take a decision to use armed force, it will be legitimate, fully corresponding to the norms of international law,' he said.
But in a hopeful sign, Putin ordered the 150,000 troops conducting a military exercises on the Ukrainian border to return to their bases.
'We aren't going to fight the Ukrainian people,' Putin said.
In Brussels, NATO held an emergency 'consultations' about the situation at the request of member nation Poland, which borders both Russia and Ukraine.
Meanwhile, tensions remained high in Crimea.
Troops loyal to Moscow fired several warning shots into the air to ward off 300 protesting Ukrainian soldiers at the Belbek Air Base. And some 16,000 Russian troops were guarding the peninsula's ferry, military bases and border posts.
Ukrainian officials denounced the Russian presence in Crimea as an 'invasion' but there was little they could do about it.
The only silver lining for the Ukrainians was in the port city of Sevastopol, where the Russians opted not to make good on their threat to take over two of their warships.
With News Wire Services
csiemaszko@nydailynews.com
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