Unidentified soldiers block a road to Ukrainian military airport Belbek not far from
Sevastopol on 28 February, 2014. Photograph: Vasily Batanov/AFP/Getty Images
Поручения в связи с ситуацией на Украине - 27 февраля 2014 года, 23:45
2/3 Фото пресс-службы Президента РоссииС председателем совета директоров закрытого акционерного общества «Трансмашхолдинг» Андреем Бокаревым.28 февраля 2014 года
Feb 28 (3)
MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia broke his silence on the crisis in Ukraine on Friday morning with a statement instructing his government to “continue contacts with partners in Kiev” and to work with international bodies to provide financial assistance for the country.
In the statement, Mr. Putin also said that authorities in the restive Crimean region of Ukraine had appealed for humanitarian aid and that he had directed the Russian government to consider the request, “including possibilities for the Russian regions to provide assistance.'’
The three-paragraph directive made no mention of former President Viktor F. Yanukovych of Ukraine, who fled the country Saturday and is now apparently in Russia. Mr. Yanukovych issued a statement on Thursday claiming that he was still the legitimate leader of Ukraine and saying he intended to hold a press conference later Friday.
Nor did Mr. Putin make any reference to the tense security situation in Crimea, where pro-Russian demonstrators have seized regional government buildings and officials are threatening to break away from the central government in Kiev.
But Ukraine’s interior minister, Arsen Avakov, said on Friday that Russian forces had seized two airports in Crimea. In a statement on his Facebook page, Mr. Avakov said he considered the actions “armed invasion and occupation in violation of all international agreements and norms.”
He said there had been no resistance to the takeovers by the armed men, who he said were Russian naval forces from the port of Sevastopol, the major base of the Russian Black Sea fleet. He said a separate group of armed men had taken over Simferopol international airport without bloodshed.
Until Friday, Mr. Putin had made no public remarks on the turmoil in Ukraine, fostering confusion and unease over Russia’s policy, even as the crisis in Ukraine has moved closer to Russia’s own border and raised concerns about Ukraine’s geopolitical and economic impact on its neighbor. Russia could stand to lose what it considers a place that is not only within its sphere of influence but part of its political, social and historical identity.
For now, Mr. Putin’s strategy for retaining Russia’s influence in a country where the Kremlin has profound interests, from its largest foreign military base to gas pipelines that fuel its economy, remains unknown and full of risks. Even so, events are subtly forcing Moscow’s hand.
Mr. Yanukovych’s appeal for Russia “to secure my personal safety,” and reports that he will hold a news conference in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don on Friday, have made it clear that the Kremlin has quietly provided at least tacit assistance to a humiliated leader who has been abandoned even by his own political supporters.
The seizure of the regional Parliament building in Crimea by masked gunmen vowing loyalty to Russia, and not Ukraine, has renewed fears that Mr. Putin could be provoked into a military intervention like the one in 2008, when Russian troops poured into Georgia to defend a breakaway region, South Ossetia, that it now recognizes as an independent country.
Russian officials have dismissed such fears as absurd, but at the same time, Mr. Putin ordered a surprise military exercise involving 150,000 troops on Ukraine’s doorstep that was clearly intended as a palpable warning about Russia’s preparedness. It prompted warnings in return from NATO and the United States that Russia should do nothing provocative and respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
Mr. Putin has a number of options to influence affairs in Ukraine short of an armed intervention. Ukraine’s economy is entwined with that of Russia, which is by far its greatest trading partner, and Ukraine’s heavy industry is hugely dependent on Russian gas. And the Kremlin can inflame separatist tensions almost at will, if it so desires, destabilizing the country. Perhaps Mr. Putin’s most effective weapon, though, is time, sitting back and watching as the West takes ownership of an economy on the brink of collapse.
Outwardly, Russia continues to insist that the turmoil in Ukraine is an internal affair and that neither it nor the United States and Europe should meddle. Events, however, are quickly overtaking that position.
Mr. Yanukovych’s flight — apparently to Russia, though his location remained unknown Thursday — has made it more difficult for the Kremlin to sustain a detached response, despite deep reservations among Russian officials over Mr. Yanukovych’s handling of the crisis and the collapse of his authority last weekend.
That ambivalence was clear on Thursday when Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, declined to confirm or deny that Russia had extended protection to Mr. Yanukovych and refused to discuss the matter of his whereabouts at all, even when pressed in a telephone interview.
“I think Putin hates Yanukovych,” said Sergei A. Markov, a political strategist who advises the Kremlin, “but what should he do for a legally elected president who asks to come to Russia?”
With Mr. Yanukovych declaring that he is still the lawfully elected leader of Ukraine and with Parliament approving a new interim government, Russia now faces the prospect of being the host of a president in exile. Mr. Markov said that Mr. Yanukovych’s presence in Russia, which is still unverified, would amount to “asylum by fact,” adding that he thought Mr. Yanukovych should have stayed in Ukraine and called on the military and security forces to rally behind him in defiance of the new leaders in Kiev.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry released a statement on Thursday complaining that an agreement brokered by three European foreign ministers only a week ago was not being honored. It insisted that the accord, which would leave Mr. Yanukovych in the presidency until new elections in December, serve as the basis of a negotiated agreement, even as the Europeans and the United States moved to recognize the legitimacy of the new interim government that was formed after Mr. Yanukovych’s escape from Kiev.
“We are convinced that only such a constitutional framework can ensure the interests of all political forces and all regions of Ukraine,” the ministry’s statement said.
In essence, the statement suggested that Russia still recognized Mr. Yanukovych as the country’s leader, though no officials have explicitly said so, even though they have denounced the new interim leaders as radicals riding to power in an armed fascist coup.
In the absence of a clear statement of Russia’s intent, the perception of its strategy has been shaped by rumors, by strident coverage on state news media and by statements of Russian lawmakers vowing solidarity with Ukraine’s ethnic Russians and questioning whether Crimea, which the Soviet Union ceded to Ukraine in 1954, should rightfully be Russia’s.
Three high-profile members of Russia’s lower house of Parliament arrived in Crimea on Thursday, visiting the city that is home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. “I arrived in Sevastopol to support residents of Crimea,” Nikolai Valuev, a former boxing champion who was elected to the Parliament in 2011, wrote on Twitter. “Friends, Russia is with you.”
He was joined by the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, and a former Olympic figure skater, Irina Rodnina, who carried the Olympic torch on its final leg at the opening ceremony of the Winter Games in Sochi (and was mired in a controversy over her recent posting of a doctored and racist photograph of President Obama and his wife, Michelle), RIA Novosti reported.
Mr. Valuev, an unmistakable presence at 7-foot-1 described the visit as a fact-finding mission “to personally interact with the residents to know the situation from the inside.” Like many officials in Russia, he said the crisis in Ukraine, or at least the foreign news media reporting on it, was clouded by Western propaganda. “There is an information war,” he wrote on Twitter.
The military exercise that began in earnest on Thursday added an ominous element of volatility. Aleksandr Golts, an independent military analyst in Moscow, said that the exercise could theoretically disguise a more general mobilization of Russia’s military in case a conflict erupted over Ukraine.
“In my view it’s very bad, even if there are no plans to use the military, that maneuvers are being held with the goal of testing the nerves of others,” he said.
To critics, especially in Ukraine, the Kremlin’s hand is seen in many of the most disturbing turns in the unfolding situation, including the visits by Russian lawmakers; reports of handing out Russian passports to Crimea’s citizens, as happened in Georgia’s breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia; and the mysterious seizure of the Parliament building in Crimea. They see the downward spiraling of events as evidence that Mr. Putin intends to splinter the country and retake Crimea as Russian territory.
“We’re not interfering,” Mr. Peskov, the president’s spokesman, said on Thursday. “We’re standing on this position.”
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KIEV, Ukraine — On Thursday, masked gunmen vowing loyalty to Russia seized the Parliament building in Simferopol, the capital of Crimea.
The simple explanation was that pro-Russian demonstrators in Crimea, a peninsula of Ukraine that juts into the Black Sea, were unhappy with the political developments here in Kiev, where three months of civic unrest led to the ouster on Saturday of President Viktor F. Yanukovych.
In a historic sense, however, Thursday’s events were as much about Russia’s relationship with Ukraine as they were about Crimea’s relationship with Ukraine. Crimea, a multiethnic region populated by Russians, Ukrainians and Tatars, has been the focus of territorial disputes for centuries, and in recent decades it has frequently been a source of tension between Ukraine and Russia.
Before this week, the most recent of these disputes occurred in May 1992, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the Crimean Parliament declared independence from Ukraine. And there has always been an expectation that when things become tense between Russia and Ukraine, that tension is likely to be felt must acutely in Crimea.
“The Crimean peninsula has become an arena for the duel between Kiev and Moscow on political, economic, military and territorial disputes,” Victor Zaborsky, an expert on the region, wrote in a 1995 paper for the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.
The 1992 dispute was resolved with an agreement known as the Act on Division of Power Between Authorities of Ukraine and Republic of Crimea, which granted Crimea autonomous status within Ukraine.
In that sense, it is similar to the status of Chechnya within Russia. Chechnya’s autonomy nods to that region’s distinct Chechen language and Muslim religion, while in Crimea, such autonomy acknowledges that the political and cultural identity is often more Russian than Ukrainian.
Historically, Crimea has been a crossroads for stampeding empires, and it has been occupied or overrun by Greeks, Huns, Russians, Byzantines, Ottoman Turks, Golden Horde Tatars, Mongols and others. It became part of Ukraine in 1954, when the Soviet ruler Nikita S. Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine, then a Soviet republic, as a gift to mark the fraternal bond between Ukraine and Russia.
As part of the 1992 dispute, Russia’s Parliament voted symbolically to rescind the gift.
Crimea is home to the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet, and also beach resorts that have long been favored by Russian and Ukrainian rulers. Russia now leases the naval installations, under a controversial deal that Mr. Yanukovych agreed in 2010 to extend by 25 ears, until 2042, in an arrangement that includes discounts for Ukraine on Russian natural gas.
The worst of the conflicts over Crimea was the Crimean War of 1853-56. At least 750,000 people were killed.
Nominally a war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire over a territorial dispute, it also ensnared France, Britain and the Italian kingdom of Sardinia, and the battlefield stretched from the White Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south.
Crimeans supporting Russia marched into a square in front of the barricaded regional parliament building, waving flags and chanting, “Rossiya, Rossiya.”
According to the most recent Ukrainian census, Crimea is home to about two million people, with nearly 60 percent identifying as Russian, nearly 25 percent as Ukrainian, and about 12 percent as Crimean Tatar, which gives the peninsula a sizable Muslim population.
The Tatars, who in 1944 were deported en masse by Stalin to Central Asia and have since returned to their homeland, have little affection for Moscow.
This week some members of the Muslim population in Simferopol demonstrated against the pro-Russia activists who, in denouncing the political developments in Kiev, have raised Russian flags and in some cases called for seceding from Ukraine and joining Russia.
Russia’s deep historical ties to Crimea and especially its military interests in the naval bases help explain why President Vladimir V. Putin and the Kremlin were so adamantly opposed to efforts by Europe to tighten ties with Ukraine. The unrest in Kiev began last November when Mr. Yanukovych, under pressure from Russia, backed away from political and free trade agreements with the European Union that he had previously said he would sign.
While Russia has major economic interests in eastern Ukraine, its military-strategic interest is greatest in Crimea.
SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine — Amid fears of a Kremlin-backed separatist rebellion here against Ukraine’s fledgling government, armed men in military uniforms took up positions at two Crimean airports as Ukraine’s interior minister warned of “a direct provocation,” but there was no sign of any violence.
In Simferopol, the regional capital of Crimea, a large number of masked armed men were stationed at the international airport Friday morning. They were dressed in camouflage and carrying assault rifles, but their military uniforms bore no insignia. It was not clear who they were and they declined to answer questions.
In Kiev, the speaker of Parliament, Oleksandr V. Turchynov, who is now the acting president of Ukraine, convened a meeting of the National Security and Defense Council to discuss the situation in Crimea.
Announcing the meeting in Parliament, Mr. Turchynov said, “Terrorists with automatic weapons, judged by our special services to be professional soldiers, tried to take control of the airport in Crimea.”
Credit Baz Ratner/Reuters
The men took up positions around a central administrative building, but they did not appear to enter the terminals. The airport, by all appearances, was operating normally, with flights arriving and departing roughly on schedule.
One local resident who was at the airport said that he did not know who the men were. “They’re not talking,” he said.
Meanwhile, another confrontation was underway at a second airport, called Belbek, that is used for military and some civilian flights.
In a post on his Facebook page, the interior minister, Arsen Avakov, said that units believed to be affiliated with the Russian military had blocked access to the airport overnight, with some Ukrainian military personnel and border guards inside. Mr. Avakov wrote that the men blocking the airport were also wearing camouflage uniforms with no identifying insignia, but he added, “They do not hide their affiliation.”
Mr. Avakov said that the airport was not functioning but that “There is no armed conflict yet.”
At the international airport, Mr. Avakov said, the Ukrainian authorities confronted the armed men and told them, “You soldiers have no right to be located here.” The uniformed men responded curtly, “We do not have instructions to negotiate with you,” he added.
“Tension is building,” Mr. Avakov wrote on Facebook, adding: “I regard what is happening as an armed invasion and occupation in violation of all international treaties and norms. This is a direct provoking of armed bloodshed on the territory of a sovereign state.”
Igor K. Tresilaty, who identified himself as assistant to the general director at the international airport, said Friday that the soldiers were remaining in common areas outside the airport, in the restaurant and in parking lots.
He added that he did not know who they were and expressed no curiosity about them, saying only that they looked professional.
“They’re walking around, but we, nor the police, can’t have any complaint against them because they’re not violating anything, they’re not touching anyone,” Mr. Tresilaty said.
He said that some of the soldiers had tried to occupy the working areas of the airport overnight but that the authorities there had not allowed it.
When a reporter suggested removing the soldiers, he invited journalists to attempt ejecting them if they felt up to the task. He said the airport was functioning normally, with no delays or cancellations.
Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, which is based in Crimea, denied that its forces were involved in the deployment at one of the airports. But the national Parliament in Kiev issued an appeal for Russia to “stop moves that show signs of undermining national sovereignty” in Ukraine, Reuters reported, and it urged the United States and Britain to honor commitments made in the early 1990s to protect the country’s territorial integrity.
Parliament also called on the United Nations Security Council to debate the issue, apparently seeking to broaden the dispute.
The rapid-fire developments came a day after a well-orchestrated power grab by pro-Russian forces played out across Simferopol on Thursday: Armed militants took control of government buildings; crowds filled the streets chanting “Russia, Russia,” and legislators called for a vote to redefine relations with Ukraine. The region is currently autonomous, meaning it has greater local control over its affairs.
Police officers, nominally under the control of the Ministry of Interior in Kiev, made little or no effort to control the crowds and, in some cases, even applauded their pro-Russia zeal. The police stood aside as the armed militants who seized government buildings overnight on Thursday built a barricade outside the regional legislature. The authorities ordered an emergency holiday, leaving streets mostly empty except for the protesters chanting for Russia, and many shops closed.
“This is the first step toward civil war,” said Igor Baklanov, a computer expert who joined a group of anxious residents gathered in a cold drizzle at a thin police line near the Parliament building, a line that quickly vanished when activists of a nationalist group called Russian Movement of Ukraine marched up waving Russian flags. They were followed by columns organized by Russian Bloc, another pro-Moscow organization.
The rush of events in Crimea, which is home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, accelerated the forces tugging at Ukraine since the ouster last weekend of President Viktor F. Yanukovych. The events also deepened a dangerous rift between Ukraine’s new leadership and the Kremlin, which has refused to recognize the new government and now appears to have given shelter to the ousted president and added a new element of uncertainty to Russia’s relations with the West. Mr. Yanukovych, last sighted in Crimea over the weekend, appears to have since been spirited to Moscow via a Russian naval base in Sevastopol, the region’s biggest city, which last Friday forced its Kiev-appointed mayor to resign in favor of a Russian businessman.
Many people in Crimea, even those who denounce the new leadership in Kiev as fascist, scorn the former president as a corrupt coward and say they have little desire to see him return. But the crowd outside Parliament in Simferopol cheered on Thursday as a protester with a bullhorn read out a statement released by Russian news agencies in which Mr. Yanukovych declared himself Ukraine’s only legitimate leader and said that Russian-speaking regions in eastern and southern Ukraine, including Crimea, would “not accept the anarchy and outright lawlessness” that has gripped the country.
“Right, right,” the crowd shouted.
By midafternoon, legislators — at least those who could get through the scrum of pro-Russia protesters outside, past barricades blocking the entrance and past unidentified armed insurgents inside — met to discuss holding a referendum on the future status of the volatile Black Sea peninsula. “Today we made a decision, a historic decision,” said Vladimir Konstantinov, the chairman of the legislature, who explained that a referendum would be held on May 25 to decide whether to “grant the autonomous republic the status of a state.”
But it was unclear what he meant exactly, and some local news reports said that the referendum would ask residents of Crimea only whether they wanted enhanced autonomy, not outright secession.
Also uncertain by late Thursday was whether enough of the assembly’s 100 members had shown up to give the legislative session the quorum needed to make its decisions legal. Refat Chubalov, a leader of the region’s minority Tatar population, a community of Turkic Muslims, said he had not been informed of the emergency session and denounced any decisions it made as invalid, noting that the building had been overrun by armed militants who hoisted the Russian flag and clearly favored a specific outcome.
If a referendum were held, it would almost certainly lead to an overwhelming popular vote in favor of weaker links with Ukraine and even outright secession.
All journalists were barred from attending the legislative session, but the Russian news media, which somehow obtained detailed information unavailable to even Crimean reporters, reported that legislators fired the head of the regional administration, a Kiev appointee, and replaced him with Sergei Aksyonov, the leader of a party called Russian Unity.
Oksana Korniychuk, a spokeswoman for the head of Parliament, was quoted as saying that Crimea was “under threat” because of the “unconstitutional seizure of power in Ukraine by radical nationalists supported by armed gangs.”
The authorities in Kiev would almost certainly dismiss any referendum as invalid. But a vote on Crimea’s status could be a gift for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who could then cast criticism of the secessionist cause in Ukraine and abroad as an affront to democracy.
Crimeans supporting Russia marched into a square in front of the barricaded regional parliament building, waving flags and chanting, “Rossiya, Rossiya.”
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Crimea, a tinderbox of ethnic, political and religious divisions, has had repeated outbursts of pro-Russia fervor that all ultimately fizzled. But the events Thursday, coupled with the fragile state of Ukraine’s new and barely functioning central government, represented a far more serious challenge to the territorial integrity of the country and an already unsettled geopolitical balance between Russia and the West.
Passions for Russia mixed throughout the day with deep nostalgia for the Soviet Union, with protesters singing the Soviet national anthem and military veterans waving the colors of long-disbanded Soviet military units.
Asked to explain their contempt for the new interim leadership in Kiev, Vitaly Yakutin, a pro-Russia student, and many others denounced it as a revival of Ukrainian nationalist forces that allied with the Nazis against Soviet forces during World War II. Russian state news media, which is widely watched in Crimea, has pumped out the same line since Mr. Yanukovych fled.
Mr. Chubalov, the Tatar leader, condemned the pro-Russia takeover attempt as a dangerous spasm of retrograde impulses. He denounced what he termed “a direct interference in the affairs of Crimea and of Ukraine.”
Crimea’s Tatar population, which was deported en masse from its homeland by Stalin, mostly wants the region to stay part of Ukraine, and although traditionally very peaceful, it has now started organizing self-defense units to fend off possible attacks by ethnic Russian militants.
It was not immediately clear what, if any, direct role Russia played in engineering the tumult, but the situation here matches in some ways a situation that previously played out in areas like Abkhazia and South Ossetia, where largely pro-Russia populations broke away from Georgia, a former Soviet republic like Ukraine, to effectively become Russian protectorates.
Russia controlled Crimea for centuries but lost it to Ukraine in 1954 after what seemed at the time an inconsequential redrawing of internal Soviet boundaries by Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Communist Party leader.
The pace of developments, set largely by well-organized pro-Russia groups that marched through Simferopol in military-style formations, has perhaps outrun even Moscow’s capacity for geopolitical machinations. Having mobilized its air and ground forces around Ukraine on Wednesday for previously unannounced military exercises in Western Russia, Moscow has raised expectations among its most zealous supporters that it will intervene to support their cause.
But any open military intervention would risk plunging Crimea, a vital outpost for the Russian Navy, into bloody chaos and also undermine security inside Russia, particularly in heavily Muslim areas.
Crimea’s Tatars have no record of extremism, but armed intervention by Moscow could strengthen the hand of tiny militant Islamic groups that have long tried, but failed, to rally Tatars for jihad.
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Президент поручил Правительству продолжить контакты с партнёрами в Киеве по вопросам развития торгово-экономических связей между Россией и Украиной.
В.Путин также поручил провести консультации с иностранными партнёрами, в том числе МВФ, по поводу оказания финансовой помощи Украине, включая консультации по этому вопросу со странами «большой восьмёрки».
Кроме того, имея в виду обращение руководства Крыма об оказании гуманитарной помощи, глава государства поручил Правительству проработать этот вопрос, в том числе по линии регионов РФ.
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