Situationen i Ukraina just nu.

So, the authorities of continental Russia and Crimea have confirmed that during the first—the most, so to speak, patriotism-saturated—week, Crimean authorities received only 20,000 applications for Russian passports.

One must agree that such pitiful figures do not justify ‘long lines,’ as some Crimean PR experts are trying to point out on Twitter. It is more likely that the statistical data on the Russian passports allow us to estimate the actual number of voters in the so-called ‘referendum.’ And this number is catastrophically small.

No wonder the Russian authorities have already threatened to issue passports automatically.

The pictures shared exclusively with The Daily Beast show members of a crack anti-terrorist unit known as the Alfa Team in the courtyard of the headquarters of Ukraine’s feared state security service, the SBU, preparing themselves for battle. The agency’s seven-story headquarters occupies an entire city block and is just three streets from the Maidan.

A U.S. intelligence source says that “since the break-up of the Soviet Union, Western security services have considered Kiev to be FSB territory.” Instructors from Russian Special Forces have trained Alfa units.---

February 20 marked a critical turning point in the conflict. It was the most violent day in the history of Ukraine since Soviet times and it proved to be the undoing of the Yanukovych regime. The snipers failed to break the spirit of Yanukovych’s opponents, but the carnage inspired key loyalists in his ruling Party of Regions, including the city’s mayor and members of the Rada, or parliament, to quit. The next day Yanukovych fled the capital, and then the country.

The death toll of at least 53 people on February 20 doubled the body count of the previous two days. At first the protesters had lost ground. Waves of coordinated sniper fire and riot police assaults pushed them back. But they clung on finally to the Maidan.---

The unique photographs and 90 gigabytes of video material shared with The Daily Beast provide strong evidence that the massacre in the Maidan was in fact a vicious and clinical assault ordered by the pro-Russian Yanukovych regime and executed by its arch loyalists.

Latest US intelligence estimates based on satellite data indicate that Russia has amassed 40,000 troops on the Ukrainian border, including a wide range of special units, elite forces and equipment.---

Russia on Sunday night set out a series of tough conditions for agreeing a diplomatic solution to the crisis over its annexation of Crimea, demanding that the US and its European partners accept its proposal that ethnic Russian regions of eastern and southern Ukraine be given extensive autonomous powers independent of Kiev.---

Lavrov said Russia remained determined to protect the rights of Russian speakers in eastern and southern Ukraine and implied that it reserved the right to take appropriate action if its proposals for a federation and other settlement terms were not accepted.---

The Russian proposal to radically alter the way Ukraine is governed and administered is certain to arouse strong opposition in Kiev, where it will be viewed by critics of Moscow's intervention in Crimea as a roundabout way of breaking up or partitioning the country.