Armed Men Take Over Two Airports in Crimea

SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine - Amid the specter of a possible showdown between Ukraine's fledgling government and the Kremlin, news agencies quoted the Ukrainian interior minister on Friday as saying armed men were in control of two airports in the region.

'I consider what has happened to be an armed invasion and occupation in violation of all international agreements and norms,' Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said on his Facebook page, according to Reuters.

At Simferopol, the regional capital, a large number of masked armed men were patrolling the international airport Friday morning. They were dressed in camouflage uniforms and carrying assault rifles but their uniforms bore no insignia and it was not clear who they were. The men took up positions around the main administrative building but did not appear to be attempting to enter the terminals and the airport appeared to be operating normally.

One local resident who was at the airport said he didn't know who the armed men were. 'They're not talking,' he said.

Mr. Avakov said Russian naval forces also took over a military airport near at Belbek near Sevastopol where the Russian Black Sea fleet is based, Reuters said.

Across the region's capital, Simferopol, a well-orchestrated power grab by pro-Russian forces played out on Thursday: Armed militants took control of government buildings; crowds filled the streets chanting 'Russia, Russia,' and legislators called for a vote to redefine relations with Ukraine. The region is currently autonomous, meaning it has greater local control over its affairs.

Police officers, nominally under the control of the Ministry of Interior in Kiev, made little or no effort to control the crowds and, in some cases, even applauded their pro-Russia zeal. The police stood aside as the armed militants who seized government buildings overnight on Thursday built a barricade outside the regional legislature. The authorities ordered an emergency holiday, leaving streets mostly empty except for the protesters chanting for Russia, and many shops closed.

'This is the first step toward civil war,' said Igor Baklanov, a computer expert who joined a group of anxious residents gathered in a cold drizzle at a thin police line near the Parliament building, a line that quickly vanished when activists of a nationalist group called Russian Movement of Ukraine marched up waving Russian flags. They were followed by columns organized by Russian Bloc, another pro-Moscow organization.

The rush of events in Crimea, which is home to Russia's Black Sea Fleet, accelerated the forces tugging at Ukraine since the ouster last weekend of President Viktor F. Yanukovych. The events also deepened a dangerous rift between Ukraine's new leadership and the Kremlin, which has refused to recognize the new government and now appears to have given shelter to the ousted president and added a new element of uncertainty to Russia's relations with the West. Mr. Yanukovych, last sighted in Crimea over the weekend, appears to have since been spirited to Moscow via a Russian naval base in Sevastopol, the region's biggest city, which last Friday forced its Kiev-appointed mayor to resign in favor of a Russian businessman.

Many people in Crimea, even those who denounce the new leadership in Kiev as fascist, scorn the former president as a corrupt coward and say they have little desire to see him return. But the crowd outside Parliament in Simferopol cheered on Thursday as a protester with a bullhorn read out a statement released by Russian news agencies in which Mr. Yanukovych declared himself Ukraine's only legitimate leader and said that Russian-speaking regions in eastern and southern Ukraine, including Crimea, would 'not accept the anarchy and outright lawlessness' that has gripped the country.

'Right, right,' the crowd shouted.

By midafternoon, legislators - at least those who could get through the scrum of pro-Russia protesters outside, past barricades blocking the entrance and past unidentified armed insurgents inside - met to discuss holding a referendum on the future status of the volatile Black Sea peninsula. 'Today we made a decision, a historic decision,' said Vladimir Konstantinov, the chairman of the legislature, who explained that a referendum would be held on May 25 to decide whether to 'grant the autonomous republic the status of a state.'

But it was unclear what he meant exactly, and some local news reports said that the referendum would ask residents of Crimea only whether they wanted enhanced autonomy, not outright secession.

Also uncertain by late Thursday was whether enough of the assembly's 100 members had shown up to give the legislative session the quorum needed to make its decisions legal. Refat Chubalov, a leader of the region's minority Tatar population, a community of Turkic Muslims, said he had not been informed of the emergency session and denounced any decisions it made as invalid, noting that the building had been overrun by armed militants who hoisted the Russian flag and clearly favored a specific outcome.

If a referendum were held, it would almost certainly lead to an overwhelming popular vote in favor of weaker links with Ukraine and even outright secession.

All journalists were barred from attending the legislative session, but the Russian news media, which somehow obtained detailed information unavailable to even Crimean reporters, reported that legislators fired the head of the regional administration, a Kiev appointee, and replaced him with Sergei Aksyonov, the leader of a party called Russian Unity.

Striped areas are predominantly

Russian-speaking

provinces in Ukraine.

Oksana Korniychuk, a spokeswoman for the head of Parliament, was quoted as saying that Crimea was 'under threat' because of the 'unconstitutional seizure of power in Ukraine by radical nationalists supported by armed gangs.'

The mood of the crowd outside soared and slumped as often contradictory - and all unconfirmed - reports filtered out from the legislature. At one point, Oleg Sluzarenko, a former member of the assembly and now a leader of a hard-line Russian nationalist movement involved in Thursday's protests, denounced legislators as scum, complaining that they were too concerned with protecting their own interests to make a decisive choice in favor of Russia. Shortly afterward, protesters started hailing the same legislators as heroes.

The authorities in Kiev would almost certainly dismiss any referendum as invalid. But a vote on Crimea's status could be a gift for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who could then cast criticism of the secessionist cause in Ukraine and abroad as an affront to democracy.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Crimea, a tinderbox of ethnic, political and religious divisions, has had repeated outbursts of pro-Russia fervor that all ultimately fizzled. But Thursday's events, coupled with the fragile state of Ukraine's new and barely functioning central government, represented a far more serious challenge to the territorial integrity of the country and an already unsettled geopolitical balance between Russia and the West.

Passions for Russia mixed throughout the day with deep nostalgia for the Soviet Union, with protesters singing the Soviet national anthem and military veterans waving the colors of long-disbanded Soviet military units.

Asked to explain their contempt for the new interim leadership in Kiev, Vitaly Yakutin, a pro-Russia student, and many others denounced it as a revival of Ukrainian nationalist forces that allied with the Nazis against Soviet forces during World War II. Russian state news media, which is widely watched in Crimea, has pumped out the same line since Mr. Yanukovych fled.

Mr. Chubalov, the Tatar leader, condemned the pro-Russia takeover attempt as a dangerous spasm of retrograde impulses. He denounced what he termed 'a direct interference in the affairs of Crimea and of Ukraine.'

Crimea's Tatar population, which was deported en masse from its homeland by Stalin, mostly wants the region to stay part of Ukraine, and although traditionally very peaceful, it has now started organizing self-defense units to fend off possible attacks by ethnic Russian militants.

It was not immediately clear what, if any, direct role Russia played in engineering the tumult, but the situation here matches in some ways a situation that previously played out in areas like Abkhazia and South Ossetia, where largely pro-Russia populations broke away from Georgia, a former Soviet republic like Ukraine, to effectively become Russian protectorates. Russian military vehicles, which had been far more visible on the streets than usual in previous days, stayed in their compounds on Thursday.

'I am very happy to see the Russian flag flying there,' said Valentina Kartushina, a Simferopol resident who on Thursday morning stood among a throng of protesters screaming for union with Russia. Russia controlled Crimea for centuries but lost it to Ukraine in 1954 after what at the time seemed an inconsequential redrawing of internal Soviet boundaries by Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Communist Party leader.

The pace of developments, set largely by well-organized pro-Russia groups that marched through Simferopol in military-style formations, has perhaps outrun even Moscow's capacity for geopolitical machinations. Having mobilized its air and ground forces around Ukraine on Wednesday for previously unannounced military exercises in Western Russia, Moscow has raised expectations among its most zealous supporters that it will intervene to support their cause.

But any open military intervention would risk plunging Crimea, a vital outpost for the Russian Navy, into bloody chaos and also undermine security inside Russia, particularly in heavily Muslim areas.

Crimea's Tatars have no record of extremism, but armed intervention by Moscow could strengthen the hand of tiny militant Islamic groups that have long tried, but failed, to rally Tatars for jihad.

In the late afternoon, around a thousand people, mostly young men dressed in black, broke away from the main protest in front of the regional Parliament and paraded down Karl Marx Street to a statue of Lenin in front of the headquarters of the regional government, which was seized by armed men overnight.

Carrying a huge Russian flag, they then marched through other parts of the city screaming support for Russia and also for Berkut, the Ukrainian antiriot force that killed more than 80 protesters in violence last week in Kiev before Mr. Yanukovych's flight.

'Glory to Berkut,' they chanted in a deliberately incendiary retort to the favorite slogan of Ukrainian nationalists, 'Glory to Ukraine.'