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| An elderly woman holds a calendar depicting Soviet leader Josef Stalin while watching a broadcast of Russian President Vladimir Putin's speech on Crimea in Sevastopol, Crimea, Tuesday, March 18, 2014, as thousands of pro-Russian people gathered to watch the address. Fiercely defending Russia's move to annex Crimea Putin said Russia had to respond to what he described as a western plot to take Ukraine into its influence. |
KIEV, Ukraine
(AP) -- 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 savior 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 Kyiv-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 recognizing 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 centers
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 clamor in eastern Ukraine,
another heavily Russian-speaking part of the country, for secession or
greater federalization. The claims of the ethnic Russian population
ignited soon after the parliament that took center 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 post-revolutionary 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 mobilize 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-defense 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 coordinator
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
memorializing 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-organize, because we are not giving up our
Ukraine to anybody."
