WASHINGTON: The White House on Tuesday ignored an appeal by Republican lawmakers to arm the Ukrainian military and only offered nonlethal weapons to help them face Russia.

The Obama administration, which has already signed a $1 billion loan guarantee to help Ukraine, is also supporting its bid to secure a $14-$18 billion loan programme. But it is reluctant to send lethal weapons as it fears it would further escalate violence.

The Obama administration’s offer of nonlethal weapons, however, was ridiculed by Republican lawmakers in Washington who urged President Barack Obama to arm the Ukrainian military with proper weapons.

“Please give the Ukrainians defensive weapons. It is insane” to offer them nonlethal arms at this stage, said Senator John McCain in an interview to the Wall Street Journal. “This administration, I never have seen anything like it in my life. It’s passive,” he added. Even the liberal Washington Post wrote that President Obama dithering on Ukraine, “disregarding his own red line.”

The newspaper recalled that the Obama administration had advised the Russian government to disarm Ukrainian separatists by this weekend or face the consequences. “The weekend has come and gone, and far from standing down in eastern Ukraine, Russia has continued to escalate,” the newspaper commented.

Earlier on Tuesday, the Obama administration said that it was readying a new round of sanctions against Russia that could be enacted as early as this week.

But Senator McCain said that even another round of sanctions may not be enough to repel Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Vladimir Putin understands peace through stre-ngth and nothing else. And so far we’ve made a lot of threats and done almost nothing,” said the Republican senator. “There is no significant penalty anywhere on the horizon.”

He asked President Obama to act now to make Mr Putin realise that the United States was ready to play an effective role in this crisis. “People are not taking the United States of America seriously and that can lead to serious problems,” Mr McCain said.

In a bid to satisfy its critics, the White House said, it “will continue to actively review requests for additional support as Ukraine’s government further modernizes its armed forces and deals with evolving threats.” Russia’s dispute with Ukraine involves the Crimean Peninsula, which until February 2014 was administration by Ukraine, although ethnic Russians are a majority there.

Beginning on February 26, pro-Russian forces began to gradually take control of the Crimean peninsula. A subsequent referendum on whether to join Russia had an official turnout of 83 per cent and nine out of ten voters voted for joining the Russian federation.

On March 17, the Crimean Parliament declared independence from Ukraine and asked to join the Russian Federation. But in a separate vote on April 15, Ukrainian parliament declared Crimea as a territory temporarily occupied by Russia. The United States supports Ukrainian position.

At an international conference in Geneva on April 17, Russia, Ukraine, the US and EU agreed to immediately end violence in eastern Ukraine and called on illegal armed groups to surrender their weapons and leave official buildings. Both sides are already accusing each other of breaking the accord.