Sunday Times 2
Pro-Russian forces tighten grip on Crimea
View(s):SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine, March 1(AFP) -Pro-Russian forces tightened their grip on Crimea today as the Kremlin vowed to help restore calm on the restive Ukrainian peninsula and Washington warned of “costs” to Moscow should it order in troops.
Armed men take up positions around the regional parliament building in the Crimean city of Simferopol today (REUTERS)
Dozens of armed men in full combat gear were patrolling the streets of Crimea’s capital of Simferopol a day after similar gunmen seized control over airports and government buildings in the Ukrainian territory where the majority of the population is Russian and where one of Moscow’s main fleets is based.
In Kiev, the new cabinet led by some of the main figures of the at-times deadly protests against ousted president Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Kremlin rule opened its first meeting with the twin spectres of secession and default hanging over Ukraine.
The new government was dealt a new jolt when Russia’s energy giant Gazprom bluntly warned Kiev that it had accumulated a “huge” debt for unpaid natural gas that needed to be urgently paid.
The strategic nation of 46 million has been torn apart between the West and Russia in a Cold War-style confrontation that has also exposed the ancient cultural rifts between its pro-European west and Russian-speaking south and east.
Nowhere has that divide been more apparent than in Crimea — a Black Sea peninsula of nearly two million people that has housed Kremlin navies for nearly 250 years and which a Soviet leader gifted to Ukraine when it was still a part of the USSR in 1954.
Pro-Russian gunmen seized Crimea’s government and parliament buildings in the main city of Simferopol on Thursday before allowing lawmakers to appoint a new prime minister and call for a regional referendum on May 25 — the day of snap presidential polls — that would proclaim even greater independence from Kiev for the already-autonomous region.
Dozens of soldiers with no insignia but dressed in Russian battle fatigues and armed with Kalashnikovs then seized Crimea’s main airport in Simferopol and Ukraine’s Belbek military air base near Sevastopol — home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
Crimea’s newly-chosen prime minister followed that up by calling on Russian President Vladimir Putin to help restore “peace and calm” amid his standoff with the Kiev authorities.
“Taking into account my responsibility for the life and security of citizens, I ask Russian President Vladimir Putin to help in ensuring peace and calm on the territory of Crimea,” Sergiy Aksyonov said in an address broadcast in full on Saturday by Russian state television.
A source in the Kremlin administration soon told Moscow’s three main news agencies that “Russia will not leave this request without attention.” Ukraine’s interim president Oleksandr Turchynov had made his own dramatic appeal to Putin late on Friday as the pace of Russian troop movements intensified around their bases and armoured personnel carriers patrolled Simferopol’s main streets.
“I personally appeal to President Putin to immediately stop military provocation and to withdraw from the Autonomous Republic of Crimea,” a sombre Turchynov said on national television.