Thursday, February 27, 2014

1:03 AM

By Unknown

In: , , ,

No comments

Gunmen Seize Government Buildings in Crimea Region - New York Times

HTTP/1.1 302 Found Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2014 08:38:51 GMT Server: Apache Set-Cookie: NYT-S=0Ma4sBMxNlJcbDXrmvxADeHxFS3UpoaKRhdeFz9JchiAIUFL2BEX5FWcV.Ynx4rkFI; expires=Sat, 29-Mar-2014 08:38:51 GMT; path=/; domain=.nytimes.com Location: http://ift.tt/1kmdoaH Content-Length: 0 Cneonction: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: Apache Cache-Control: no-cache Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Content-Length: 67487 Accept-Ranges: bytes Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2014 08:38:51 GMT X-Varnish: 358240498 358240442 Age: 4 Via: 1.1 varnish Connection: keep-alive X-Cache: HIT






Europe |Gunmen Seize Government Buildings in Crimea Region



http://nyti.ms/1fKkvcn



The Russian flag was raised atop the Crimean Parliament building in Simferopol on Thursday. Oleksandr Polehenko/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images








SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine — Armed men seized government buildings in Ukraine’s Crimea region on Thursday, barricading themselves inside and raising the Russian flag, according to wire service reports.


Arsen Avakov, Ukraine’s acting interior minister, said on Thursday morning that an unknown group armed with automatic weapons had seized the Crimean Parliament building in Simferopol.


“Measures are being taken to counter the extremist actions and prevent an escalation of an armed conflict in the center of the city,” Mr. Avakov wrote in a posting on his Facebook page. “Provocateurs are on the march,” he added. “It’s a time for cool heads, the healthy consolidation of forces, and careful action.”



Related Coverage




  • A woman and her child lighting candles Wednesday in memory of protesters killed in recent clashes with the police in Kiev.

    In Ukraine, Naming of Interim Government Gets Mixed ResponseFEB. 26, 2014




  • Catherine Ashton, left, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, met in Kiev on Tuesday with Yulia V. Tymoshenko, the former Ukrainian prime minister who was freed from prison.

    Tentatively, European Union Weighs Its Options on Support for a New UkraineFEB. 25, 2014





The events came a day after thousands of protesters in Simferopol, the capital of Ukraine’s Crimea region and a tinderbox of ethnic, religious and political divisions, clashed in the tumultuous struggle for Ukraine that drove the president from power last weekend and that has pushed Russia and the West into a face-off reminiscent of the Cold War.




Play Video




Video|0:48

Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times



Rival Protesters Clash in Crimea


Scuffles erupted outside the regional Parliament in Crimea as thousands of pro-Russia demonstrators confronted Muslim Crimean Tatars backing the new Ukrainian leadership.


Eight hundred miles away, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was ordering a surprise military exercise of ground and air forces on Ukraine’s doorstep on Wednesday, adding to the tensions with Europe and the United States and underscoring his intention to keep the country in Moscow’s orbit.


Taken together, the events illustrated the continuing challenges that the new government in Kiev faces in calming separatism at home and placating a frustrated Russian leader who sees Ukraine as a vital part of his strategy of rebuilding Russian influence along the lines not of the former Soviet Union, but of the czars. While few analysts expected a Russian military intervention in Ukraine, most said that Mr. Putin was likely to respond in some fashion to such a stinging geopolitical defeat.


The question was how, and on Wednesday he provided a first answer, when Russia’s military put tens of thousands of troops in western Russia on alert at 2 p.m. for an exercise scheduled to last until March 3. The minister of defense, Sergei K. Shoigu, also announced unspecified measures to tighten security at the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet on the Crimean Peninsula.


Russian military vehicles have been far more visible in recent days on the streets of Crimea, residents say, suggesting that Moscow, while probably not gearing up for armed conflict, wants to make its presence felt in this potentially volatile region, where it has a number of naval and other military facilities dating from the Soviet Union.


In a sign of heightened tension, road blocks flying Russian flags appeared Wednesday on the main thoroughfares leading to Sevastopol, a Crimean city dominated economically and politically by the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet. About 25 miles from the city center on the road from Simferopol, men in blue uniforms and others in green camouflage clothing stopped and inspected all vehicles. An armored personnel carrier, apparently Russian, was parked nearby.


General Shoigu announced the snap exercise during a meeting of Russia’s general staff members, citing the need to test the Russian armed forces’ readiness to respond to a “crisis situation.”


Senior defense and government officials later said that the exercise was not related to the events in Ukraine, which officials here have watched with growing alarm, but they also said that there was no reason to postpone them either, and the geopolitical message was clear.



The orders came as thousands of ethnic Russians gathered outside the regional Parliament in Crimea’s capital, Simferopol, to protest the political upheaval in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, that felled the government of President Viktor F. Yanukovych over the weekend and turned him into a fugitive. Crimea was Russian territory until the Soviet Union ceded it to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine in 1954, and Russians there have already pleaded for the Kremlin’s intervention to protect the region from Ukraine’s new leadership.


“Crimea is Russian!” some of the protesters screamed as brawls erupted with rival demonstrations by Crimea’s ethnic Tatars supporting the new interim authorities.




Rival protesters clashed in Simferopol, Crimea’s regional capital. Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

Determined to block the local legislature from heeding calls from pro-Russia activists for more autonomy and even secession from Ukraine, 5,000 Crimean Tatars, the region’s indigenous Turkic, Muslim population, traded taunts and occasional blows with protesters waving Russian flags.


After a peaceful start, the dueling rallies turned into a melee in the late afternoon. A couple of dozen Tatars broke into the legislative building, surging past riot police officers to confront anxious local legislators huddled inside.


“Where are the separatists?” screamed a furious Tatar activist, banging a wooden staff on the marble floor.


The anger of a Muslim community known for its peaceful ways and its general lack of interest in radical strains of Islam highlighted how the political tumult in Kiev has stirred a riptide of conflicting passions throughout a country of 46 million that is now struggling to stay together.


The military maneuvers were widely seen as saber-rattling by a Kremlin that has spent a decade or more trying to extinguish separatist sentiments in the North Caucasus and elsewhere. They nevertheless elicited new warnings from Western governments, notably the United States, which reminded Russia of its own admonishments to the West about its military interventions in Libya and other nations.


Speaking to a small group of reporters in Washington, Secretary of State John Kerry said it was important for the Russians “to heed those warnings as they think about options in the sovereign nation of Ukraine.”


Mr. Kerry did not specify what the United States was prepared to do in response to a Russian military intervention, focusing instead on what he said the Russians would sacrifice.


“I think it would cost them hugely in the world, where they are trying to assert a sort of greater legitimacy with respect to their diplomacy,” he said.


Mr. Kerry also said that the United States was considering a $1 billion package of loan guarantees to Ukraine, as well as direct aid to the Ukrainian government, to help address the deepening economic crisis there.




President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered surprise military exercises on Wednesday. Mikhail Metzel/RIA Novosti, via Associated Press

Russia has refused so far to recognize the legitimacy of the new political powers in Ukraine’s Parliament, and denounced their actions since Mr. Yanukovych’s flight as inflammatory and divisive, including what the Foreign Ministry described on Wednesday as discrimination toward Russian Orthodox believers. Two days earlier Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev said the turmoil posed “a real threat to our interests and to our citizens’ lives and health.”



“I think it is flag waving, but it’s more than that also,” Dmitri Trenin, the director of the Moscow Carnegie Center, said after the announcement of the exercise. “It’s a message to Kiev not to impose its rule in Crimea by force.”


Mr. Putin himself has yet to make public remarks on the crisis in Ukraine, but senior officials have vowed not to interfere directly and called on the United States and Europe to do the same. Even so, the public clamor of ethnic Russians in Crimea and eastern Ukraine has raised fears that Russia could be provoked to intervene.


The home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet for centuries and embedded deep in Russian culture thanks to the works of writers like Tolstoy, Crimea became part of Ukraine only in 1954, a transfer that made little difference at the time because both Ukraine and Russia belonged to the Soviet Union.


Since Ukraine’s emergence as an independent state in 1991, many of the ethnic Russians who make up a majority of Crimea’s population have nursed dreams of returning to Russia’s fold, a goal that has gained a fresh wave of passionate support since Mr. Yanukovych’s ouster.



“I don’t want to live in a country run by fascists,” said Sergei Gaenko, a retired law enforcement official, echoing a widespread view here that Mr. Yanukovych’s ouster was engineered by the political descendants of militant Ukrainian nationalists who, during World War II, sometimes formed loose tactical alliances with Hitler’s invading army.


Crimea, he added, was “illegally given to Ukraine” by Nikita S. Khrushchev and he said it was time to “correct an historic injustice.” Like many Russians here, he described the new interim government as being made up of “Banderovtsi,” a derogatory Soviet term used to describe followers of Stepan Bandera, a wartime Ukrainian nationalist leader vilified by Moscow as a pro-Nazi traitor.


The minority Tatars, however, have little love for Moscow after being deported en masse by Joseph Stalin and, now back in their homeland, want to carve out their own space inside Ukraine.


“We have a long memory of what Russia did to us Tatars,” Refat Chubarov, a member of the Crimean Legislature and a Tatar community leader. Pro-Moscow members of the assembly, furious at the cancellation of an extraordinary session they had called to discuss a response to events in the capital, accused Mr. Chubarov of using a mob to derail democracy. Most people on both sides of the Russia-Ukraine divide have no interest in violent confrontation, but small militant groups have been increasingly active in trying to rally people for battle. In Sevastopol, Crimea’s biggest city, pro-Russian groups have been signing up residents for so-called “self-defense” units while hard-line Cossack organizations, recalling past campaigns to expand and secure Russia’s borders, denounced politicians who call for calm as cowards.


A small number of militant Tatars, encouraged by extremists abroad, have tried over the years to recruit Crimea’s Muslims for jihad, but their efforts have fallen flat. Any move to restore Crimea to Russian rule, however, would risk breathing life into such calls for extremism.


That, among other reasons, is why few people, even in Russia, expect to see an intervention. “Such a scenario is impossible,” Valentina I. Matviyenko, the chairwoman of Russia’s upper house of Parliament, said Wednesday, according to the Interfax news agency.



Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting from Washington.




Site Index











Source: Top Stories - Google News - http://ift.tt/1fVRs27

0 comments:

Post a Comment