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Meanwhile, Ukraine’s prosecutor has said it will ask Russia to extradite Viktor Yanukovych, who is wanted for alleged “mass murder”, if it is confirmed he is in Russia.
Need I say that it is highly unlikely Russia will comply.
As we wait to hear from ousted Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who is due to give a press conference from Russia at 1pm GMT, a Swiss prosecutor has opened a money laundering investigation into him and and his son Oleksander, Reuters reports.
A statement from the prosecutor’s office in Geneva said:
A penal investigation for severe money laundering is currently being conducted in Geneva against Viktor Yanukovich and his son Oleksander.
It said prosecutor Yves Bertossa and the police had searched the office of a company owned by Oleksander Yanukovych on Thursday morning and seized some documents.
Switzerland yesterday it would order banks to freeze any funds in Swiss banks found to be linked any Yanukovych funds.
The ousted president Viktor Yanukovych, wanted for alleged “mass murder” in Ukraine, is giving a press conference from Russia later, from a secret location.
Harriet Salem, reporting for the Guardian, has been to Sevastopol airport. She told me:
On the road between Sevastopol and Simferopol there was a roadblock but they were letting most people through with Crimean number plates. A sign at the roadblock read “People who live by the sword…” but the second half was missingA man at Sevastopol airport, who said he was a captain in the tactical aviation brigade in Sevastopol but declined to give his name, told the Guardian there were about 300 people of unknown identity inside the airport but he said, without elaborating: “We don’t consider it any invasion of our territory.”He said the men looked like military, were wearing two different types of uniform, and were armed with sniper rifles and AK-47s. “We don’t know who they are, nor where they’ve come from” he said He also said that there were two Kamaz (a manufacturer of trucks) vehicles inside. “They [the vehicles] looked like they could contain 50 people at a push so how they got 300 people inside, I don’t know,” he saidMajor Fidorenko from the Ukrainian military at the base at the airport said they’d been in touch with the unknown gunmen who said they were there “to prevent unwanted landings of helicopters and planes”.
The UK foreign office has updated its travel advice for Ukraine, warning British nationals not to try to leave from Simferopol airport “until the situation becomes clearer”.
It says:
Armed men are reported to have seized Simferopol airport early on 28 February. Although the airport is reportedly operating as usual, we do not advise British nationals to try to leave from there until the situation becomes clearer. Sevastopol (Belbek) airport is also reported to be blocked by military and flights are not operating.
As fears grow over Ukraine separating, Russian MPs have said that they plan to submit a bill to parliament that would make it easier for new territories to join the Russian Federation.
Mikhail Yemelyanov, a leader of the A Just Russia party, cited the “unpredictable” situation in Ukraine as the reason behind the move, which would allow a territory would be able to join the Russian Federation on the basis of a referendum or a decision of its parliament.
Radio Free Europe says that Russia’s “Kommersant” currently requires “the mutual consent of the Russian Federation and this foreign state,” confirmed by an international treaty.
Ukraine’s parliament is asking the UN security council to call a session to consider the country’s current problems. It has also urged Russia to stop moves which it says undermine Ukrainian territorial integrity.
More on the response from Russia’s Black Sea fleet to accusations that it has taken over or blocked the military airport near Sevastopol. In a statement, it said:
No units of the Black Sea fleet were deployed in the area of Belbek nor did they take place in blockading it.
But it said it had stepped up measures by its “anti-terror units” to protect areas where parts of the fleet were located in Crimea and the living quarters of service personnel and families “given the unstable situation”.
Ukraine’s acting president Oleksandr Turchynov has called an emergency session of his security chiefs on the events in Crimea and has accused Russian forces of involvement in “escalation” of the situation there.
Ukraine’s economy minister Pavlo Sheremeta told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme what was happening in Crimea was “absolutely unacceptable”. Asked about the possible use of force in Crimea, he said:
At the moment I do not see any discussion of using the force but ....if we need to use the force to protect the territorial integrity of the country - we would rather avoid it, of course - but the integrity of the country will be kept for sure.
He said “the first option is communication” and that the Ukrainian government was already talking to its Russian counterpart.
Russia’s Black Sea fleet says its forces have not seized or taken any action at the airport near Sevastopol, close to its naval base, Interfax is reporting.
The chairman of Russia’s state Duma, Sergey Naryshkin, has proposed asking the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe’s advisory body on constitutional matters, to assess the legitimacy of Ukraine’s new government, Interfax Russia is reporting.
Both Ukraine and Russia are members of the 47-nation Council of Europe.
Updated
Despite the actions by gunmen at Simferopol airport, the airport is running normally, a spokesman has told Interfax Ukraine.
The airport’s departure board is listing two flights - to Kiev and Moscow - as having departed this morning with the gate closed for another flight to Kiev, although it appears to be somewhat delayed, having been scheduled to leave at 7.20am local time this morning.
The Interfax Ukraine report says:
Some reports suggest that these people came to the airport because they thought that an airplane carrying some protest forces had landed there. Other theories indicate that they wanted to stop Ukraine’s new interior minister Arsen Avakov and Ukrainian security council head Valentyn Nalyvaichenko from arriving in Crimea.
Read the whole story
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NOVI PETRIVTSI, Ukraine — Arthur Pereverziev is just 24, but he has the calm air of command. Thrown early into politics by the tumultuous decade that began with the Orange Revolution in 2004, he was an instrumental member of the civilian group Vidsich, or Repulse, which opposed the presidency of Viktor F. Yanukovych.
Now, after three months at the barricades in Independence Square, Kiev’s central square that is also known as the Maidan, Mr. Pereverziev finds himself in charge of Mr. Yanukovych’s bizarre pleasure palace, here on the Dnieper River outside the capital.
As hundreds of Ukrainians wandered agog through the 350-acre grounds of the estate and banged on the windows and gaudy doors of the palace, hoping to be allowed inside, Mr. Pereverziev stood in one of the lavish marbled halls and marveled.
“It’s so expensive, and so cheesy,” he finally said. “It was almost too much to be amazed. When you suddenly see such beautiful things in a beautiful setting, that’s one thing. But when a man who has no taste throws everything together, the beautiful and the ridiculous, that’s something else.”
Mr. Yanukovych took what was once a simple state-owned guesthouse and transformed it into a gilded mishmash of bad mosaics, valuable icons, leather recliners, suits of armor, expensive chandeliers and toilets that look like golden thrones. Though Mr. Pereverziev expressed contempt for the trappings of such a lifestyle, he is anxious to guard and preserve it all now, because by order of the Ukrainian Parliament, it is once again the property of the state.
He was dismayed by the disappearance of some swords and pistols. The contents of the hilltop palace, known as the Mezhyhirya, were photographed and inventoried the first night the group occupied the building, but when he and his exhausted troops slept afterward, they awoke to find 12 items missing. Three of them, he said proudly, have since been found where they had been hidden away.
But what really upset him, Mr. Pereverziev said, was the danger that this revolution would be short-circuited the way the 2004 revolution was, by a failure to change the political system and bring in new, younger, cleaner, more cosmopolitan leaders who would be less beholden to Russia and the kleptocracy of the past.
“The new people in charge are already making some of the same mistakes, by giving posts to corrupted officials,” he said with some bitterness. “They’re corrupted morons, and everyone knows it.”
This time, he thinks, a new Ukrainian generation will not tolerate a repetition of the past with new faces. “We want to change the system, the way of doing politics, not just to end the corruption,” he said. “Ukrainians want to own their own lives, for themselves, and not for the oligarchs and the politicians. After 22 years of independence, we finally want to live like human beings.”
For the last two months, Mr. Pereverziev has been the commander of what he called the 16th regiment of the Maidan self-defense forces. He said there were about 40 such “regiments” — with about 100 troops, they are more like companies — created over the past three months, and their commanders are called Sotnyks, an old Cossack rank roughly equivalent to a captain in the Ukrainian army. His wife commands a smaller women’s division.
The palatial compound of Viktor Yanukovych, the former president of Ukraine, was opened to the public over the weekend, offering a glimpse of his lavish lifestyle.
As for Russia, Mr. Pereverziev says he thinks that Moscow’s efforts to meddle in Ukraine “to escalate the situation” will fail, especially given that the Tatars, the ethnic minority indigenous to Crimea, support a united Ukraine. “Russia has nothing to offer us except fuel and energy,” he said. “And in the time of shale gas, soon we won’t need them.”
Russia’s political system was a model for Mr. Yanukovych, he said, and will probably share the fallen president’s fate.
“This will also finish Russia in the end,” Mr. Pereverziev said, “as an empire, as a kleptocratic state.” From Ukraine, “they stole our identity, our language, our land,” he added. “They called us ‘mali brati,’ ” — little brothers — “but we’re not brothers at all, that’s just propaganda.”
His concerns about the future are widely shared here.
Ulia Turko, 27, worked for legislators in the Ukrainian Parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, until she had her daughter, Solomia, 10 months ago. “I saw them and heard them in the Verkhovna Rada,” she said, referring to the Parliament, as she wandered among the memorials to the dead in the Maidan on Wednesday. “They don’t care about anyone else.”
Ms. Turko also wants better, younger leaders, shaped less by traditional politics than by the experience of the fight for the Maidan and by a more open-minded life.
She said she wants Ukraine finally to stand up against the dictatorship of the past and against pressure by outsiders to shape its future. “Russia has no right to interfere here,” she said. “But that’s also true of the countries of the European Union. I think they both want to get their own benefits.”
Ms. Turko said the revolution was against the vivid, uncontrolled corruption of Mr. Yanukovych and his “family,” including his suddenly wealthy son, more than it was about any geopolitical question.
She watched a procession of mothers winding through the still-smoking barricades of the Maidan, carrying photographs of their dead, each photograph surrounded by a crown of thorns, mixing cries of “Glory to the heroes!” with patriotic songs.
“We would like Russia we would like everyone — to understand how we feel,” Ms. Turko said. “We want to be free.”
At the Yanukovych palace, Mr. Pereverziev said he was ready to fight again, if necessary, for lasting change. “We’ll fight the new power, too, in the future, if it’s anything like the previous one,” he said.
Read the whole story
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Tensions rise over Crimean peninsula