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

18:07: At least five Russian Il-76 planes have landed at a military airport in Gvardiysky, near Simferopol, Ukrainska Pravda internet newspaper reports citing eyewitnesses. Reports also say a column of Russian armoured personnel carriers is heading towards Simferopol.

“Moscow’s military moves so far resemble a classically executed coup,” writes former Guardian Moscow correspondent Luke Harding: “seize control of strategic infrastructure, seal the borders between Crimea and the rest of Ukraine, invoke the need to protect the peninsula’s ethnic Russian majority...

The Kremlin’s favourite news website, Lifenews.ru, was on hand to record the historic moment. Its journalists were allowed to video Russian forces patrolling ostentatiously outside Simferopol airport.

Wearing khaki uniforms – they had removed their insignia – and carrying Kalashnikovs, the soldiers seemed relaxed and in control. Other journalists filming from the road captured Russian helicopters flying into Crimea from the east. They passed truckloads of Russian reinforcements arriving from Sevastopol, home to Russia‘s Black Sea fleet.

The Kremlin has denied any involvement in this very Crimean coup. But Putin’s playbook in the coming days and months is easy to predict. On Thursday, the Crimean parliament announced it would hold a referendum on the peninsula’s future status on 25 May. That is the same day Ukraine goes to the polls in fresh presidential elections.

The referendum can have only one outcome: a vote to secede from Ukraine. After that, Crimea can go one of two ways. It could formally join the Russian Federation. Or, more probably, it might become a sort of giant version of South Ossetia or Abkhazia, Georgia’s two Russian-occupied breakaway republics – a Kremlin-controlled puppet exclave, with its own local administration, “protected” by Russian troops and naval frigates. Either way, this amounts to Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, de facto or de jure.

Ett generellt intryck jag har fått här på plats är att även fast Svoboda och andra nationalister verkar lugna på ytan, så händer det mer än vad som syns. Detta är en nation i total omvandling. Den öppna revolutionen har nu blivit en tyst sådan, en revolution som kanske inte syns på gatorna mer än på de fortsatt bevakade barrikaderna, total frånvaro av polis men desto flera skyddskårer. Det råder ingen tvekan om att revolutionen nu endast har gått in i en annan fas. Det är alldeles för mycket undertryckt vrede som har blossat upp i ukrainarnas bröst, ett sådant totalt förakt för den korrupta demokratin. Jag känner, djupt, att jag är övertygad om att Europas omdaning har börjat här, i Kiev, Ukraina.

18:33: Russian President Vladimir Putin of Russia calls for a "rapid return to normality" in Ukraine and warns against any further unrest in telephone calls with key EU leaders, Reuters news agency quotes the Kremlin as saying.

18:32: Ukraine's prosecutor-general's office announces that it has started extradition proceedings against former President Viktor Yanukovych, Ukrainian's Unian news agency reports. (BBC Monitoring)

18:31: Opposition leader Vitaly Klitschko tells the BBC Russia is deliberately escalating tensions in Crimea. "It's done specifically to spread the conflict," he said. "I don't understand the position of some people who are playing in favour of heating up this stand-off. And we have a lot of information today that Russian Federation troops participated in it, and I'm certain that we need to approach the Russian Federation, asking [them] not to interfere."

18:30: There is a growing mistrust of Russian intentions in Ukraine which has spawned calls in certain circles for America to stand up to Russia and deter it from seeking a "soft partition of Ukraine", the BBC's David Willis in Los Angeles reports.