Ukraina valde Ryssland före EU - stora protester som följd, länkar i inlägg2

Krim är en autonom parlamentarisk republik inom Ukraina. Dom har ett eget parlament, där även ett ryskfientligt parti är representerat. Republiken har egen flagga och statsvapen. Har en egen konstitution. Dom bildar sin egen regering, har eget lagstiftande organ. Dom har egen premiärminister som framröstas genom demokratiska val som tillsätter regering efter godkännande av Urkainas president

Mr Obama had a 90 minute conversation with President Putin on Saturday afternoon during which he called on Russia to withdraw forces and “refrain” from further interference.

Russian vehicles near Balaclava Russian vehicles near Balaclava Russia’s current position is a breach of the UN Charter and the 1997 military basing agreement with Ukraine, as well as the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and the Helsinki Final Act, the White House said.

In that statement, the US warned it would “suspended upcoming participation” in G8 preparatory meetings, adding: “Going forward, Russia’s continued violation of international law will lead to greater political and economic isolation.” President Obama also pledged further financial assistance to the new government in Kiev.

Pro-Russian protests were reported in the eastern cities of Kharkiv, Donetsk and Luhansk and the southern port of Odessa. In Kharkiv, 97 people were injured in clashes between pro-Russia demonstrators who flushed supporters of the new Ukrainian government out of the regional government building and hoisted the Russian flag on top of it, according to the Interfax news agency.---

On Saturday, Sergei Aksyonov, the Prime Minister of Crimea, asked the Russians for military aid. The catalyst, supposedly, was the attempts by agents sent by the new Ukrainian government to storm institutions in Simferopol. The Kremlin at once expressed “deep concern”, saying what happened “confirms the intention of prominent political circles in Kiev to destabilise the situation on the peninsula”.

Yet there were contradictory accounts of what had happened, from Simferopol and Moscow. Mr Aksyonov had stated that the gunmen had carried out assaults on the ministerial council and the Supreme Court. According to reports coming from Moscow, the target was the interior ministry. None of the buildings, however, showed signs of a firefight or bullet holes.

Crimean officials were remarkably vague about what had happened.

Nevertheless, protective cordons were raised by former Soviet soldiers and members of the “People’s Brigade of Concerned Citizens”, which was formed in the past 48 hours. On morning guard with a chestful of medals, one veteran of Russia’s Afghan campaign, who lives near the interior ministry, had not heard any gunshots. But he was convinced that “those fascists of the Maidan [the centre of protests in Kiev] have entered Crimea secretly”. He said: “The criminals in Kiev have asked the Americans to invade. We have all heard this. That’s why the Russians must help us quickly.”

At the Armyansk checkpoint, there were three different kinds of militants.

One of the groups were Kuban Cossacks, whose uniforms included fur hats. They were the only group who did not hide their faces.

The second group wore good quality camouflage uniforms with no military insignia, but were assumed to be Russian soldiers. Akim Vishnevskiy, a journalist of Hromadske TV, who also tried to enter Crimea through the same checkpoint, said that they are equipped very differently than the Ukrainian special services.

“They're special military units, with water storage on their back,” he says.

The other group was seemingly composed of representatives of Berkut riot police, which had been dismissed by the Ukrainian government for excessive violence and crimes during the protests, but then formed anew by the Crimean authorities under Russian patronage. Russian consulate in Simferopol also said it was ready to issue passports to Berkut troopers, in violation of Ukrainian law.

But Bohdan Kutiepov, a journalist from Hromadske TV, who also tried to enter Crimea by road on March 1, said the militants seemed to no longer recognize Ukrainian law.

“We told them they were on the territory of Ukraine, but they said they don't think so. They think they're now on Russian territory,” says Kutiepov.

Time will tell how the Ukraine street responds to Putin. He is banking on a Georgian answer, that shock and awe will dissuade Ukrainians—their forces no match for Russia’s—from engaging in a drawn-out conflict such as Moscow faced in Chechnya, or any conflict at all.

In this sense, Putin’s brinksmanship is short-sighted. He has already squandered the good feelings earned at the Sochi Olympics. If Kiev keeps to its independent course, he will possess another spit of territory in a foreign land, perhaps with added strips of eastern Ukraine, as well, if his men keep marching. But he will lose the heartland of Kiev to the West, and perhaps end up in a bloody new guerrilla conflict.

As for diplomacy, some say the US and the West have few options in the way of response. That is also not true. NATO will not—nor should it—go to war. But, as Eugene Romer and Andrew Weiss write at Politico, Russia’s honorary membership in the G-8 is probably now history: The western-led leadership group will be back to the G-7.

Russia’s protesters have, however, so far proven largely unwilling to demonstrate the kind of spectacular commitment to change exhibited by their counterparts in Kiev. Brief attempts by more radical members of the opposition to establish a permanent protest camp in Moscow after Putin’s controversial 2012 election victory were met with alarm and bewilderment by mainly middle-class protesters. If a sustained attempt to dislodge Putin is to materialise, then its “muscle”, as in Ukraine, is likely to be supplied by the far-Right. “For Russia to get its own Maidan, we need the participation of at least 7,000 nationalist activists and 150,000 ordinary citizens, hipsters and the like,” said Dmitry Dyomushkin, the ex-head of the outlawed ultra-Right Slavic Union movement.
“In this case, we’d see an escalation, victims and open confrontation, and so on,” Dyomushkin added. “But so far the protests have all been hijacked by liberal protest leaders.”

There are also formidable logistic obstacles to sustained street protest in Moscow, the stronghold of the anti-Putin movement. Unlike in Ukraine, where western regions seethed with anti-government sentiment, organised dissent has failed to take hold in Russia’s provinces. Discontent may be growing in Russia’s poorer regions, but there is also deep distrust of the figures driving the Moscow-based opposition to Putin. In Ukraine, the Maidan camp was supplied by activists making daily runs from opposition-held cities such as Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk. In Russia, any protest camp in Moscow would be likely to be targeted by Putin loyalists shipped in from the conservative heartland.