Ukraine authorises soldiers to ‘fight back’ after troops storm bases in Crimea; two dead in fighting
8 hours ago
March 19, 2014 1:08PM
news.com.au
UKRAINE’S leadership simmered with a mix of hopelessness and anger at losing Crimea, tempering an influx of eager young men signing up as reservists with the growing certainty that no saviour would deliver them from the Russian takeover.
For Ukraine’s government in Kiev, it is a crime — one the inexperienced leaders can do little do address in the face of an overwhelmingly superior military force. But for at least one of the group of people in the new leadership, it is a reality that must be dealt with on practical terms.
"This is theft on an international scale, when under the cover of troops, one country has just come and robbed a part of an independent state,’’ Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said.
Yatsenyuk’s government now has to contend with the immediate complications of an armed confrontation that flared up Tuesday. A Ukrainian military spokesman said a serviceman was killed and another injured when a military facility in Crimea was stormed by armed men. The official said a truck bearing a Russian flag was used in the operation.
Yatsenyuk said the storming showed the dispute "has gone from the political stage to the military through the fault of the Russians.’’
But if his rhetoric was combative, there was little to back it up. That is in part down to Ukraine’s relative helplessness and its stated desire to refrain from aggression, but is also a reflection of what authorities see as Moscow’s inflated demands. Rejecting international condemnation, Russian President Vladimir Putin cast his government’s actions as the righting of historic injustices.
"They are demanding to change the constitution, to change the system, to give up Crimea. This is the language of an aggressor ... this is the language of Josef Stalin,’’ said Oleksiy Haran, a politics professor at the University of Kiev-Mohyla Academy. "Ukraine has done everything which it can. We resisted from violence, which again the West demanded from us. We didn’t kill any Russian soldiers.’’
While not recognising the referendum, Ukrainian authorities’ preparations for the practicalities of the situation hint at a mood of resignation.
The justice minister offered emergency accommodation in vacation centres for any Ukrainian citizens who want to leave Crimea, where the ethnic Russian population is a majority.
"My advice to compatriots who live in Crimea is not to give up your Ukrainian passports. You are citizens of Ukraine and you are in effect hostages of the occupiers,’’ Justice Minister Pavel Petrenko told Channel 5 television. "People should make their own decision about revoking citizenship and nobody has the right to force them.’’
Ukraine’s one major lever of power — the electricity and water that comes from the mainland — is complicated by the new Kiev government’s reluctance to alienate the residents, a majority of them ethnic Russians, but with large Ukrainian and Tatar communities.
With the outcome of the Crimean predicament still nominally in the balance, the government is confronting a growing clamour in eastern Ukraine, another heavily Russian-speaking part of the country, for secession or greater federalisation. The claims of the ethnic Russian population ignited soon after the parliament that took centre stage after last month’s ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych provoked outrage — from the Kremlin most notably — by moving to downgrade the role of the Russian language.
That plan has since been dropped and Yatsenyuk on Tuesday insisted that Russian would retain its official status in areas where it is spoken by the majority.
"Nobody is encroaching on your right to freely use the Russian language. My wife Tereziya speaks primarily in Russian. And she, like millions of other Russian speakers, does not require protection from the Kremlin,’’ he said.
To deal with Moscow, Ukraine will need to restore channels of dialogue, which Russia is reluctant to do with a postrevolutionary government that it describes in the most disparaging terms.
Sergei Taruta, a billionaire businessman appointed by interim authorities to govern the heavily industrial Donetsk region, told The Associated Press that he has proposed the creation of a "national unity forum’’ as a possible solution to that problem.
"We should choose delegates that could lead diplomatic dialogue with Russia. Because as I understand it, there is no negotiator now that has a legitimate mandate,’’ he said. "It is only through a negotiation that we can solve the fraught problems that affect both Crimea and eastern Ukraine. And I think that this negotiating group should also work with a group of Western guarantors that could vouch for the territorial integrity of our country.’’
The government announced this week that it will over the coming 45 days mobilise tens of thousands of reservists. Recruitment officers stationed along a main street in the capital, Kiev, were signing up volunteers on Tuesday.
At least one of the self-defence groups that came to prominence during the protests, Spilna Sprava, has intimated that it intends to ready for a fight as a partisan force.
"In the conditions of war with Russia, the regular army has shown itself to be insufficiently effective, which is something Ukraine’s army command has admitted,’’ Interfax news agency cited Spilna Sprava co-ordinator Alexander Danilyuk as saying.
On and around the Kiev square from which the protest movement sprung up, crude barricades remain in place and within them, groups of men young and old in store-bought fatigues mill around, sharing jokes and warming themselves by barrel fires.
The plan is for people on the Maidan, as the square is known, to stay until a new and elected government is formed and to ensure that it lives up to its promises.
Vasily Volchenko, a 51-year old retired career military officer manning a stall of knick-knacks memorialising the bloody protests that culminated in Yanukovych’s overthrow, said the loss of Crimea is not going down well.
"We had hoped the government, even though it is only provisional, would react quickly, but they have done practically nothing,’’ he said. "If they think they can give up Crimea that easily, then they are quite mistaken. We will just self-organise, because we are not giving up our Ukraine to anybody.’’
PUTIN: WE WERE ‘ROBBED’ OF CRIMEA
Sixty years ago locals in Crimean went to bed Russian and woke up Ukrainian and this week it has happened in reverse.
Earlier in the day Mr Putin said he felt his country had been “robbed” by the breakup of the Soviet Union and loss of Crimea to Ukraine and he was now pleased to take it back.
Mr Putin, armed with annexation approval from the Russian Constitutional Court, historically addressed both Houses of the Russian parliament. He said the move was legal and simply addressed a 20-year-old anomaly.
In what is considered the most significant redraw of Europe since the Second World War, Mr Putin said he had history and international law on his side.
He confirmed for the first time the 25,000 unmarked troops on the Black Sea peninsula for the past two weeks were Russian and were there for stability.
He said the annexation of Crimea would not lead to the break up of Ukraine as Russia did not want the rest of that country.
To a standing ovation as he entered the room, Mr Putin told the joint parliamentary session the referendum held over the weekend had overwhelmingly supported a move to rejoin Russia and he had signed a draft to approve that move.
It was time the region now become Russian, he said, as Russian-speakers of the province were under threat from fascists, Neo-Nazis and radicals from the capital Kiev who had staged a coup.
“To the people of Ukraine, in no way do we want to damage you and insult your national feelings … hear me my dear friends, don’t trust those who frighten you about Russia … it will remain Russian, Ukrainian and Crimea Tartarian … but it will not be a region of barbarians,” he said to rousing applause.
He described in a lengthy historical oratory how the Crimean referendum was now of “historic significance” and was “more than convincing” to reinforce their cultural and historical links.
He pledged the rights of the indigenous Tartar people would be respected, touching on one of the great fears of Crimea.
He said Crimea’s transfer to Ukraine 60 years ago was an improbable formality as was the breaking up of the Soviet Union in 1991.
But he said it remained an integral part of Russia, past and present, and he revealed its return was first looked at by the Kremlin back in 2000, with the aid of the then Moscow-backed government of Kiev.
He accused the west of overreaching their limit in support of the Kiev authorities and had lost “political sense”, including with their “aggressive” sanctions, forcing the hand of Russia.
He said Germans more than anyone should understand breakups and reunification.
“Our western partners headed by the United States prefer not to be guided by international law in their practical policies, but by the rule of the gun,” he told the televised event.
“They have come to believe in their exceptionalism and their sense of being the chosen ones. That they can decide the destinies of the world, that it is only them who can be right.”
Mr Putin’s address came as Ukraine positioned 40,000 reservists on the eastern border of their country amid fears Russia would now seek to carve up the rest of the country under the same premise.
For the past two days trains have been transporting aged Soviet-era tanks and armoured personnel carriers to support the troops.
The Ukrainian mobilisation came with revelations Russia had moved at least 8000 troops and tanks, heavy artillery and rocket launchers west from central Russia and Siberia.
Meanwhile, Crimean authorities announced it would adopt the Russian rouble and dump the Ukrainian hryvnia currency in April although it did not elaborate on how the transition in salaries, pensions and retail goods could be made so fast.
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