We have the right to invade neighbour:President Vladimir Putin

Tension has mounted after President Vladimir Putin declaration that he has the right to invade his neighbour.Ukraine has mobilised for war and the US has threatened to isolate Russia economically as Putin sparked Moscow’s biggest confrontation with the West since the Cold War.

“This is not a threat: this is actually the declaration of war to my country,” Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk, head of a pro-Western government that took power when Russian ally Viktor Yanukovich fled last week.Ukraine’s navy chief has switched allegiance to the pro-Russian authorities of the flashpoint peninsula of Crimea.

But just a day after the new leadership appointed Denis Berezovs

ky as the navy chief, he defected, AFP reported..

Putin obtained permission from his parliament on Saturday to use military force to protect Russian citizens in Ukraine, spurning Western pleas not to intervene.

Russian forces have already bloodlessly seized Crimea – an isolated Black

Sea peninsula where Moscow has a naval base. On Sunday they surrounded several small Ukrainian military outposts there and demanded the Ukrainian troops disarm.

Russia has staged war games with 150,000 troops along the land border, but so far they have not crossed. However, pro-Russian demonstrators have marched in the east of the country and have raised Russian flags over government buildings in several cities, in what Kiev says is a move orchestrated by Moscow to justify a wider invasion.

Ukraine’s security council ordered the general staff to immediately put all armed forces on highest alert.

US Secretary of State John Kerry condemned Russia for what he called an “incredible act of aggression” and threatened “very serious repercussions”.

Kerry said Moscow still had a “right set of choices” to defuse the crisis. Otherwise, G8 countries and other nations were prepared to “to go to the hilt to isolate Russia”.