Western media on Ukraine - 03/15/2014

All seems to be quiet in Crimea ahead of tomorrow's referendum.  The western press is stressing warnings of a Russian invasion while talking of the Ukrainian "president" as if he were a legitimate, elected leader.

The Russians, on the other hand are reporting on troubles in East Ukraine and efforts to have the governor released from captivity.

We will just have to wait until tomorrow and beyond.

Ukraine's president fears Russia could invade after Crimea referendum

the Guardian,

14 March, 2014

Link to video: Tatars in Crimea: caught between the west and a hard place

Ukraine's president has said that there was a "real danger" Moscow would seize further territory after the referendum in Crimea, and he accused "Kremlin agents" of orchestrating turmoil in the Russian-speaking east of his country.

Acting leader Oleksander Turchinov said there was every possibility that Russia would advance deeper into Ukraine following Sunday's poll, which has been condemned by the west as illegal. He told parliament: "The situation is very dangerous. I'm not exaggerating. There is a real danger from threats of invasion of Ukrainian territory. We will reconvene on Monday at 10am."

A group of Russian commandos advanced beyond Kremlin-occupied Crimea on Saturday and landed by helicopter in an area of southern Ukraine under Kiev's control, Ukraine's defence ministry said. Some 60 Russian troops arrived at 1.30pm in the village of Strilkove, in Kherson province, 5km beyond the autonomous Crimean border. They came in four helicopters. Another 60 flew in in six helicopters at 3.30pm.

Early reports suggested that Ukrainian forces evicted them, but the Russian contingent still appeared to be there on Saturday night. A spokesman for Ukraine's border guard service, Oleg Slobodyan, said the Russian soldiers had taken up positions next to a gas production facility, backed by three armoured personnel carriers. Ukrainian troops had reportedly retreated to a nearby crossroads.

Ukraine's foreign ministry dubbed the incursion a "military invasion by Russia". It demanded that Moscow withdraw its forces and said Ukraine "reserves the right to use all necessary measures" to stop the invasion. The area, Arbatskaya Strelka, is a long section of land running parallel to Crimea. Since independence it has been in Kherson province, but the land was originally part of Soviet Crimea and Vladimir Putin may be attempting to restore this Communist-era border.

Most of the infrastructure that supplies Crimea with water and electricity is in the Kherson region. Reports suggest that Crimea's secessionist authorities have claimed the gas production company that owns the facility, which would explain the arrival of Russian troops.

Ukraine's acting foreign minister, Andriy Deshchyta, told the Observer on Saturday that it is essential that the new government in Kiev, supported by the EU and the US, resists what he called Russian "provocations". He said he was prepared to discuss greater autonomy for Crimea – but only with the proper "legal authorities" there, and not while there were "guns on the streets". He described the referendum as "totally illegal". In Kiev the Rada, Ukraine's parliament, voted to dissolve the regional assembly in Crimea that organised Sunday's poll and has already endorsed union with Russia.

At the UN security council in New York, Russia vetoed a US-backed motion declaring the Crimea referendum invalid. The Russian envoy, Vitaly Churkin, claimed that Crimea was given illegally to Ukraine in Soviet times – a view apparently held by Putin. Russia's vote was the only no, with China abstaining, while 13 nations voted yes. The US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, said the result underscored Moscow's profound isolation over Crimea. Russia could not, she said, "deny the truth that there is overwhelming international opposition to its actions".

The mood in the east, meanwhile, remains febrile following three deaths in two days in the cities of Donetsk and Kharkiv. On Thursday evening, Russia's foreign ministry posted an ominous statement saying that Moscow reserved the right to "protect" ethnic Russians in Ukraine. A day later, following talks with US secretary of state John Kerry in London, Russia's foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said no invasion was "planned".

There was more violence on Saturday when pro-Russian protesters stormed Donetsk's security service. Both cities have seen large pro-Russian demonstrations stirred up – Kiev says – by Moscow and its operatives on the ground.

Addressing parliament, and speaking to the political faction of fugitive president Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia, Turchinov declared: "You know as well as we do who is organising mass protests in eastern Ukraine. It is Kremlin agents who are organising and funding them, who are causing people to be murdered."

On Saturday, a local journalist in Kharkiv, Zurab Alazania, told the Observer that "Russian tourists" from across the border were travelling throughout the region – with a hardcore of about 1,000 pro-Russian activists inflaming tensions. "The mood is dangerous. It's difficult to live here. There are a lot of thugs in the city." He warned: "There can be further bloodshed, not only in Kharkiv."

Two men, aged 21 and 30, were killed by buckshot late on Friday when pro-Russian demonstrators besieged an office of the far-right Ukrainian nationalist group Right Sector, which rose to prominence fighting riot police in Kiev over the winter. Police said 32 Right Sector activists and six pro-Russian demonstrators were detained and a number of weapons seized.

A spokesman for Right Sector in Kharkiv said his group had been besieged in their office overnight by pro-Russian activists firing shotguns and rifles and throwing petrol bombs and stun grenades.Kharkiv governor Ihor Baluta, newly appointed by the interim authorities in Kiev, said the "well-planned provocation by pro-Russian activists" began when unidentified men in a minibus provoked a confrontation with pro-Russia demonstrators and then drove off. When pursuing demonstrators caught up with the vehicle, it was parked outside the nationalists' building.

The Right Sector spokesman, quoted by Interfax-Ukraine news agency, said his group had taken no part in the initial clash and believed the minibus was left outside its office by others.

The prominence of groups like Right Sector in positions of influence in Kiev, and measures such as a short-lived move last month to end the use of Russian as an official language, have led Russia to accuse leaders of a "coup" in Ukraine of planning to impose "fascism" and discriminate against Russian speakers.

In Moscow, a senior foreign ministry official with responsibility for human rights issues, Konstantin Dolgov, said on Twitter that the arrest in Kharkiv of people he described as "neo-fascist militants" must be followed by wider action to "neutralise and punish rampant extremists".

Western powers, preparing economic sanctions against Russia over Crimea, largely dismiss Russia's characterisation of the new authorities in Kiev as the successors of Nazi-allied Ukrainian forces that fought the Red Army in the second world war.

Reports of armed police 

raiding hotel in Simferopol

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/15/ukraine-crisis-fatal-clashes-as-tensions-rise-before-crimea-vote-live

Here’s Reuters take on the hotel incident. It counts 30 armed men in balaclavas and quotes Crimea’s de-facto defence minister saying it was a false alarm:

Armed police burst into a hotel in Simferopol, the capital of Crimea, on Saturday night on the eve of a referendum aimed at deciding whether the Ukrainian region leaves Ukraine and becomes part of Russia.

Witnesses saw around 30 men in balaclavas carrying automatic weapons inside the Hotel Moscow, a Soviet-era hotel popular with Western reporters covering Sunday’s referendum.

The witnesses said the men burst in brandishing weapons and made their way to the building’s fourth floor.

Crimean Defence Minister Valery Kuznetsov told reporters that police were reacting to an alert which turned out to be false.

“We received a false alarm. We came to check,” he told reporters at the hotel.

“We have checked everything and it turned out to be bogus. There is an information war going on, being waged by Kiev ... So we have to check everything and be ready for any contingency.”

By 9:40 p.m. (1940 GMT) the policemen had started to leave the hotel.

The incident occurred at a time when Russian state media has ratcheted up its anti-Western rhetoric, accusing the West of supporting what it says are fascist elements within Ukraine’s provisional government.

Western reporters working in Crimea have complained of harassment by pro-Russian activists in recent days.

Some witnesses at the hotel said the raid appeared to be designed to intimidate journalists on the eve of the referendum.

Ukraine Says It Has Repelled 

A Russian Army "Invasion"

Zero hedge,

15 March, 2014

With a day left until the critical, if widely expected, results from the Crimean referendum are revealed, it is worth recalling the main footnote in last night's State Department travel alert for Russia: "all U.S. citizens located in or considering travel to the border region, specifically the regions bordering Ukraine in Bryansk, Kursk, Belgorod, Voronezh, and Rostov Oblasts and Krasnodar Krai, should be aware of the potential for escalation of tensions, military clashes (either accidental or intentional)." See, for the purpose of a military provocation, "accidental" will do. It is therefore not surprising to see that moments ago all major news wires blasted the following headline, quoting the Ukraine ministry of defense:

• UKRAINIAN MILITARY REPELS ATTEMPT BY RUSSIAN FORCES TO ENTER REGION ADJACENT TO CRIMEA-UKRAINE'S DEFENCE MINISTRY

The incursion allegedly took place in the Ukraine region of Kherson, neighboring the Crimea.

Below is a video allegedly showing the Russian military helicopters involved in the incursion:

Here is the full google translated statement from the Ministry website:

Another provocation on the part of members of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation has failed.

 

Today, 15 March 2014, forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine halted the penetration of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation on the territory of Kherson Oblast from the "Arabatka." Response was made immediately.

AFP summarizes the incident as as follows:

Ukraine accused Russia on Saturday of invading a region bordering Crimea and vowed to use "all necessary measures" to ward off an attack that came on the eve of the peninsula's breakaway vote.

 

The dramatic escalation of the most serious East-West crisis since the Cold War set a tense stage for the referendum on Crimea's secession from Ukraine in favour of Kremlin rule -- a vote denounced by both the international community and Kiev.

 

The predominantly Russian-speaking Black Sea region of two million people was overrun by Kremlin-backed troops days after the February 22 fall in Kiev of a Moscow-backed regime and the rise of nationalist leaders who favour closer ties with the West.

 

President Vladimir Putin defended Moscow's decision to flex its military muscle by arguing that ethnic Russians in Ukraine needed "protection" from violent ultranationalists who had been given free reign by the new Kiev administration.

 

But Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had told Secretary of State John Kerry in London on Friday that Moscow "has no, and cannot have, any plans to invade the southeast region of Ukraine."

 

The invasion reported by the Ukrainian foreign ministry was small in scale and concerned a region that lies just off the northeast coast of Crimea called the Arabat Spit.

 

The Ukrainian ministry said 80 Russian military personnel had seized a village on the spit called Strilkove with the support of four military helicopters and three armoured personnel carriers.

 

The Ukrainian "foreign ministry declares the military invasion by Russia and demands the Russian side immediately withdraw its military forces from the territory of Ukraine," it said in a statement, "Ukraine reserves the right to use all necessary measures to stop the military invasion by Russia."

 

There was no immediate response to Ukraine's announcement from Moscow but Washington's UN representative Samantha Power called any new Russian troop movement in south Ukraine an "outrageous escalation".

So the official line is that the Ukraine repelled a Russian "military force" in a region inside east Ukraine and out of Crimea the day after Russia's foreign minister Lavrov said Russia has no plans to Invade Ukraine? Call us cynical, but something tells us if Russians wanted to "penetrate" east Ukraine, the would have done so without "being repelled."

Additionally, here is Reuters' take:

Ukraine's military scrambled aircraft and paratroops on Saturday to repel an attempt by Russian forces to enter a long spit of land belonging to a region adjacent to Crimea, Ukraine's defence ministry said.

 

"Units of Ukraine's armed forces today...repelled an attempt by servicemen of the armed forces of the Russian Federation to enter the territory of Kherson region on Arbatskaya Strelka," a ministry statement said. "This was repelled immediately."

 

It said the Ukrainian military used aircraft, ground forces and its aeromobile battalion in the operation. The territory in question is a long spit of land running parallel to the east of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula, now controlled by Russian forces.

But just so Russia isn't accused of being inert, moments ago it too re-escalate the war of words and provocations, either accidental or intentional, and stated that:

• RUSSIA'S FOREIGN MINISTRY SAYS REQUESTS FOR DEFENCE OF PEACEFUL CITIZENS IN UKRAINE WILL BE CONSIDERED

Specifically, the Russian Foreign Ministry says in website statement that it will examine Ukrainians’ requests. Armed radicals are heading to eastern Ukrainian cities of Donetsk, Lugansk. Radicals provoked 2 deaths at pro-Russian rally in Kharkiv. The full statement is below:

On March 14 in Kharkov Ukraininan elements including the "Right Sector" arranged provocation against peaceful demonstrators who came to express their attitude to the so-called new government. As a result, the militants opened fire, killing two people, some were injured.

 

Of disturbing information that from Kharkov Donetsk and Lugansk left column with armed mercenaries "right sector" , whose leaders have announced the opening of the "Eastern Front" , and on one of the garment factories in Russia urgently sew uniforms.

 

At the risk of making the Verkhovna Rada of legitimizing the "right sector " and other radicals by converting them into system power structures like the National Guard

paid attention Secretary of State John Kerry Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during their meeting in London on 14 March . of While Lavrov urged John Kerry to use Washington's influence on Kiev to curb rampant ultra- nationalists.

 

Russia To receive many calls asking to protect civilians. These applications will be considered.

Meanwhile in Crimea, the Russian flag is already flying above the Crimean 

Supreme Council:

And finally, just in case things weren't exciting enough, the US appears to finally be flexing its muscles too.

• U.S. WARSHIP TRUXTUN TO CARRY OUT FURTHER EXERCISES WITH ALLIES IN BLACK SEA-COMMANDER

From Reuters:

The USS Truxtun, a U.S. guided-missile destroyer, will carry out more exercises with allied ships in the Black Sea, its commander said on Saturday, in a further sign of the international response to Russia's actions in Ukraine.Commander Andrew Biehn was briefing reporters aboard the 300-crew destroyer as it lay docked in a Bulgarian port.

 

The USS Truxtun last week took part in drills with Romanian and Bulgarian ships a few hundred miles from Russian forces that entered Ukraine's Russian-majority of Crimea after mass protests toppled the country's pro-Moscow president.

If all this has happened while it is still light in Ukraine and before the Crimean referendum, we can't wait until darkness falls on Sunday night.