No basis for Russian action says Hague

In a Commons statement, Mr Hague said the Ukrainian crisis posed “a threat to hard-won peace and security in Europe”.

He had no doubt that the troops in Crimea were acting on Moscow’s orders, despite Mr Putin’s insistence that they were “local self-defence forces”.

And he dismissed the Kremlin’s justification for its actions, telling MPs: “The suggestion that a president who has fled his country then has any authority whatsoever to invite the forces of a neighbouring country into that country is baseless.

“Russia has also argued that Russian-speaking minorities in the Ukraine are in danger, but no evidence of that threat has been presented.”

Mr Hague insisted all Britain’s options remained open, telling MPs that an inadvertently revealed document which appeared to rule out trade sanctions was “not necessarily a guide to the decisions that will be made by Her Majesty’s Government”.

Mr Putin has indicated that he was not planning a repeat of last weekend’s Crimean takeover elsewhere in Ukraine.

He cautioned that any sanctions against Russia could cause “mutual harm”.

Mr Hague urged Russia to join him in Paris for talks today under the terms of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which offered Ukraine assurances about its security in return for giving up its nuclear weapons and which was signed by Russia.