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Russia Says It’s Preparing Counterproposals for Crimea as Russian Forces Strengthen Grip There Russia’s Grip Tightens With Shows of Force At Ukrainian Bases
(about 5 hours later)
KIEV, Ukraine — Russia said Monday that it cannot accept the “fait accompli” of the new Western-backed government in Ukraine and was preparing diplomatic counterproposals to serve “the interests of all Ukrainians,” even as Russian forces strengthened their control over Crimea, less than a week before a contentious referendum on the future of that southern Ukrainian region. CHORNOMORSKOYE, Ukraine — Russian forces raided a Ukrainian naval missile base here in the darkness of early Monday, scaling its outer walls and outmatching the surprised sailors inside without firing a shot, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and people familiar with the raid.
The Russian position came in a televised clip showing Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov briefing President Vladimir V. Putin in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, the site of the Winter Olympic and Paralympic games. The seizure was one of a series of swift but thus far bloodless escalations as Russia tightened its grip on Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that the Kremlin is leading toward secession from Ukraine by a combination of military and political moves.
Mr. Lavrov said that proposals made by Secretary of State John Kerry “did not completely satisfy us” because they used “the situation created by the coup as a starting point.” He told Mr. Putin that Mr. Kerry had delayed a visit to Moscow and that Russia was working on new proposals of its own. Russian forces also infiltrated an air base at Novofedorivka and took up position along a runway; took over a military hospital in the regional capital, Simferopol; and moved onto a Ukrainian base used by a motorized battalion in Bakhchysaray.
But in Washington, State Department officials said that it was the Kremlin that had thwarted the prospects of a negotiated solution, or even another meeting between Mr. Kerry and his Russian counterpart, by refusing to engage on the American proposals, especially the idea that Russian officials meet with officials from the new Ukrainian government. Russian soldiers penetrated the last base after firing in the air, said Vladislav Seleznev, a Ukrainian military spokesman in Crimea. No one was reported hurt.
When Mr. Kerry sent Mr. Lavrov a series of questions on Saturday over the Kremlin’s stance, Russian officials never responded, the State Department said. These emboldened actions played out while diplomacy stalled, with Russia asserting that it cannot accept the “fait accompli” of the new Western-backed government in Ukraine and that Western proposals to defuse the crisis used a “situation created by the coup as a starting point.”
“Secretary Kerry made clear to Foreign Minister Lavrov that he would welcome further discussions focused on how to de-escalate the crisis in Ukraine if and when we see concrete evidence that Russia is prepared to engage on these proposals,” Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, said in a statement. That position came in a televised clip showing Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov briefing President Vladimir V. Putin about how Russia was preparing diplomatic counterproposals to serve “the interests of all Ukrainians.”
The Russian diplomatic moves seemed to Ukrainian officials to be delaying tactics as Russian forces acted more assertively in Crimea, taking over a military hospital in the regional capital, Simferopol, and a military base in Sevastopol, where Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is based. The United States and its allies have joined the Ukrainian government in declaring the Russian occupation of Crimea illegal and a Kremlin-backed referendum on whether Crimea should secede and seek to join Russia, set for Sunday, unconstitutional and nonbinding.
The Russians also took over a small Ukrainian naval supply base at Chornomorskoye, on the western coast, where pro-Russian “self-defense units” and police patrolled the town, threatened journalists from The New York Times and a man they were interviewing and confiscated the journalists’ notes. They also took a small base housing a Ukrainian motorized battalion in Bakhchisarai after firing in the air, said Aleksey A. Mazepa, a spokesman for the Ukrainian ministry of defense in Crimea. No one was reported hurt. The military advances suggested how little influence the Western stance has had on the ground, and on the speed and tactical confidence with which Russia is consolidating its military position.
Pro-Ukrainian demonstrations in Crimea have been broken up, some Ukrainian journalists have been beaten and Ukrainian television channels there have been replaced with Russian ones ahead of the contentious referendum next Sunday about whether to secede from Ukraine and join Russia. Here in Chornomorskoye, people familiar with the raid said that 200 to 250 Russian soldiers arrived outside the naval base’s walls early Monday morning and quickly scaled the fences and dropped inside.
Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, the Ukrainian prime minister, will speak to the United Nations on Thursday, a day after he meets President Obama in the White House in what the administration intends to be a show of firm American support. The United States and its allies have joined the Ukrainian government in declaring the Russian occupation of Crimea illegal and the referendum unconstitutional and non-binding. The soldiers, variously described as members of Russian special forces or perhaps a paratrooper unit, rushed the base’s headquarters and seized the checkpoint at its entrance. They carried machine guns, automatic rifles, grenade launchers and sniper rifles, including new sniper rifles often carried by elite Russian units.
The Ukrainian foreign minister, Andriy Deshchytsya, received his counterparts from Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, who had come Monday to show support. “We have to admit that our life now is almost like a war,” he said. “We have to cope with an aggression that we do not understand.” The Ukrainian naval contingent, perhaps 40 or 50 sailors and officers, belonged to a technical service that manages naval missiles and had only light weapons — mostly pistols and automatic rifles.
He said Ukraine is counting on help from abroad to deal with Russia and restore Crimea to Kiev’s control. Outgunned and surprised, they did not resist, people familiar with the raid said. The Russian commander, described as a colonel, announced that “we are soldiers from the Russian Federation” who had come to protect the base and its equipment.
The United States and European countries like Germany, Britain and France have been pushing for a contact group to include Russia and Ukraine to de-escalate the conflict, one of the most serious East-West confrontations since the breakup of the Soviet Union. There were no further threats and no violence, people familiar with the raid said.
But while the West recognizes the new interim government in Kiev, with presidential elections scheduled for May, Russia wants to return to a late February deal that former President Viktor F. Yanukovych signed, agreeing to a new unity government and new presidential elections in December. Moscow insists Mr. Yanukovych remains Ukraine’s lawful president and was deposed, while the West says he abandoned his post and was legally replaced by a constitutional majority vote of the Ukrainian parliament. By daylight Monday, the Ukrainian sailors had placed their weapons in their armory and had been escorted off their base, leaving behind two officers, including the commander, a navy captain, to continue to negotiate with the occupying force.
According to the Russian media, Mr. Yanukovych will make a public statement on Tuesday in Rostov-on-Don, in southern Russia, where he has sought Russian protection. Russian soldiers, some masked and other showing their faces, had complete control of the base. They could be seen guarding a main entrance beside a Russian military truck and roaming in knots among the buildings visible behind the gate.
Germany, with close ties to Russia, has so far not succeeded in budging Moscow in any clear way. “We can see that time is really very pressing,” Steffen Seibert, a spokesman for the German government, said in Berlin on Monday, one day after Chancellor Angela Merkel again called Mr. Putin and urged him to facilitate the creation of a contact group to bring Russia and Ukraine into talks. A fire truck was also placed immediately behind the gate, ready to blast water at any protesting crowds. None appeared.
“There can be no playing for time,” Mr. Seibert said at a news conference. “We are expecting concrete steps for the development of a contact group.” At one point, a lone Ukrainian sailor approached in civilian clothes, pressed his face against the fence and tried to draw the soldiers into an argument. “I serve here,” he said.
There were signals, too, that the Kremlin was focusing closely on events in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian feeling runs high. He made a brief effort to push his way back to his post, but two pro-Russian civilians grabbed him by the back of his collar and shoved him away. The soldiers watched, a few paces away, and chuckled. The apparent noncommissioned officer, who led the soldiers on guard duty, refused to answer questions from two journalists.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that lawlessness now rules in eastern Ukraine as a result of extreme rightists “with the full connivance” of the Kiev authorities. “No comment,” he said.
The statement claimed that masked men had fired on and injured peaceful protesters last week in Kharkiv. Ukraine has said that Russia is fabricating such charges as part of a propaganda campaign to destabilize the Kiev government and justify possible new military action in the east. Kharkiv police said that they are treating the alleged shooting as a minor incident, according to Reuters. He added, “We will answer your questions after the referendum.”
Kiev has been working to reassert its control over the cities of the east. In Lugansk, the capital of a coal-mining region that borders Russia, police freed a regional administration headquarters, which had been captured by pro-Russian demonstrators on Sunday, and briefly arrested their leader, Arsen Klinchayev, a local councilman. Russian military forces also surrounded the Southern Naval Base, a Ukrainian installation on Donuzlav Bay, cutting off the troops inside and blocking the Konstantin Olshansky, an amphibious tank landing ship docked there.
Oleg Lyashko, a far-right member of the Kiev government who flew to Lugansk to break the siege, released a video of himself and several supporters arresting Mr. Klinchayev and violently interrogating him before later handing him over to police. (Last week, the Russians scuttled the Ochakov, a decommissioned ship, in the narrow entrance to the bay, effectively preventing the Konstantin Olshansky from leaving.)
“When we’re talking about the territorial integrity of a country, people don’t play at that,” Mr. Lyashko lectured Mr. Klinchayev, who sat with arms handcuffed behind his back, stomach exposed. The Russian soldiers at the base were supported with a backhoe, which they had used to settle in, digging fighting positions and piling a dirt wall around a large canvas tent.
In Kiev, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the wealthy Russian businessman and dissident who was jailed for a decade until December, said that the struggle over Crimea had importance for Europe and the world. Roughly 15 of the soldiers, armed and wearing masks, refused to answer questions and pushed journalists back toward the main road, walking behind them with weapons ready. “Go away,” their leader said.
He said Crimea should remain part of Ukraine but with broad autonomy akin to Scotland in the United Kingdom. In Chornomorskoye, the situation was more tense. A mix of about 20 local pro-Russian police officials and unidentified men in camouflage and ski masks abruptly intervened in an interview between two reporters and a local man.
“For Russians, it’s a sacred place, an important element in our historical memory and the most painful wound since the Soviet collapse,” Mr. Khodorkovsky told a packed audience at Kiev Polytechnic University. But nothing, he said, could justify “such a blatant incursion into the affairs of a historically friendly state.” The men demanded to know if the reporters were pro-Russian, then confiscated their notebooks and tore out any pages with writing on them. “We will translate these,” one of them said, pocketing the pages and handing back the now-blank notebooks.
Speaking later, he said that the stakes were high for Mr. Putin and Russia, too. “If a war between Ukraine and Russia happens, or even a paramilitary conflict which does not go into military phase, then we can forget about democratization of Russian public life forever,” he said. They also examined the photographs in digital cards in a photographer’s cameras.
They clustered menacingly around the local man and said, “You keep giving interviews and you will end up in prison in Sevastopol,” the city in the peninsula’s southern shore that part of Russia’s Black Sea fleet uses as a home port.
They refused to allow the journalists to leave for about 15 minutes before ordering them to depart the city.
The Russian presence has been felt more heavily throughout Crimea as the referendum approaches, with at least five activists and journalists disappearing in the past two days.
Kateryna Butko a member of the Kiev-based opposition group AutoMaidan, as well as two journalists, Oleksandra Ryazantseva, an independent blogger, and Olena Maksymenko, a reporter with The Ukrainian Week, were stopped at a checkpoint on the Crimean border.
According to witnesses, the women were detained by masked men with guns and made to kneel at the side of the road, before being driven away to an unknown location. On Monday, AutoMaidan activists were searching Simferopol and Sevastopol fruitlessly for the women, who they believe are being held by local security services.
Andrei Shchekun and Antatoly Kovalsky, a trustee at a Ukrainian school in Simferopol, also disappeared on Sunday, hours before they were expected to speak at an antisecessionist rally. Mr. Kovalsky’s son said the men were abducted from the city’s train station by members of Russian Unity, the party headed by Crimea’s new separatist leader, Sergei Aksyonov.
“He’s been taken by these brigands that call themselves the authorities,” the son, Sergey Kovalsky, said.
Other Russian troops could be seen throughout the day and into Monday night, moving methodically down roads in convoys that included BTR armored fighting vehicles and transport trucks with beds packed with troops in helmets. Their destinations were not clear.
In Yevpatoriya, on the peninsula’s west coast, a Ukrainian air defense base was presented an ultimatum in writing from the Russian-backed Crimean authorities, demanding that they set aside their weapons and cede the base by 10 p.m.
The deadline passed without incident.