Crimeans OK Ukraine exit, Russia union

West slams referendum, vows economic sanctions

Referendum officials empty ballot boxes to begin counting votes at a polling station in Simferopol, Ukraine, Sunday, March 16, 2014. Polls have closed in Crimea's contentious referendum on seceding from Ukraine and seeking annexation by Russia. The vote, unrecognized both by the Ukrainian government and the West, was held Sunday as Russian flags fluttered in the breeze and retirees grew weepy at the thought of reuniting with Russia. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

Referendum officials empty ballot boxes to begin counting votes at a polling station in Simferopol, Ukraine, Sunday, March 16, 2014. Polls have closed in Crimea's contentious referendum on seceding from Ukraine and seeking annexation by Russia. The vote, unrecognized both by the Ukrainian government and the West, was held Sunday as Russian flags fluttered in the breeze and retirees grew weepy at the thought of reuniting with Russia. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

Monday, March 17, 2014

SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine - Just two weeks after Russian troops seized their peninsula, Crimeans voted Sunday to leave Ukraine and join Russia, overwhelmingly approving a referendum that sought to reunite the strategically important Black Sea region with the country it was part of for more than two centuries.

The vote was widely condemned by Western leaders, who planned to move swiftly to punish Russia with economic sanctions.

As the votes were counted, a jubilant crowd gathered around a statue of Vladimir Lenin in the center of Simferopol to celebrate with song and dance. Many held Russian flags, and some unfurled a handwritten banner reading “We’re Russian and proud of it.” Fireworks exploded in the skies above.

“We want to go back home, and today we are going back home,” said Viktoria Chernyshova, a 38-year-old businessman. “We needed to save ourselves from those unprincipled clowns who have taken power in Kiev.”

Ukraine’s new government in Kiev, the capital, called the referendum a “circus” directed at gunpoint by Moscow, referring to the thousands of troops who occupy the peninsula, which has traded hands repeatedly since ancient times.

The referendum offered voters the choice of seeking annexation by Russia or remaining in Ukraine with greater autonomy. After 50 percent of the ballots were counted, more than 95 percent of voters had approved splitting off and joining Russia, said Mikhail Malishev, head of the referendum committee.

Final results were not expected until today.

Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted the referendum was conducted in “full accordance with international law and the U.N. charter.”

Russia was expected to face strong sanctions today from the U.S. and Europe for going forward with the vote, which could also encourage rising pro-Russian sentiment in Ukraine’s east and lead to further divisions in the nation of 46 million. Residents in western Ukraine and Kiev are strongly pro-West and Ukrainian nationalist.

President Barack Obama told Putin on Sunday that Crimea’s vote to secede from Ukraine and join Russia would never be recognized by the United States.

The White House said Obama told Putin the Crimean vote violates the Ukrainian Constitution and occurred under duress of Russian military intervention.

Even before the incomplete results were announced, the White House denounced the vote, saying “no decisions should be made about the future of Ukraine without the Ukrainian government” and noting that Russia had rejected the deployment of international monitors in Crimea to ensure the rights of ethnic Russians there were protected.

White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said on NBC’s Meet the Press that Russia faces penalties that would hurt its economy and diminish its global influence if Putin didn’t back down.

“President Putin has a choice about what he’s going to do here. Is he going to continue to further isolate himself, further hurt his economy, further diminish Russian influence in the world, or is he going to do the right thing?” Pfeiffer said.

Andrew Weiss, vice president for Russian and East European studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, suggested the confrontation could intensify.

Russia “is really turning its back on the outside world and is basically going to say to the West, ‘Now, go ahead. Show us how tough you are.’ And the West, I think, is struggling to come with an adequate response.”

The European Union on Sunday condemned the referendum as well, but the EU also indicated it realized change might not be imminent.

“We cannot have any short-term hopes now that the situation regarding Crimea can be changed so quickly,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told ZDF television. “I assume Russia has made all the preparations to bring Crimea into Russian territory.”

The Crimean parliament planned to meet today to formally ask Moscow for annexation, and Crimean lawmakers were to fly to Moscow later in the day for talks, Crimea’s pro-Russia prime minister said on Twitter.

Russian lawmaker Vladimir Zhirinovsky said the annexation could take “from three days to three months,” according to the Interfax news agency.

Some residents in Crimea said they feared the new Ukrainian government that took over when President Viktor Yanukovych fled to Russia last month would oppress them.

“It’s like they’re crazy Texans in western Ukraine. Imagine if the Texans suddenly took over power [in Washington] and told everyone they should speak Texan,” said Ilya Khlebanov, a voter in Simferopol.

Ukraine’s new prime minister insisted that neither Ukraine nor the West would recognize the vote.

“Under the stage direction of the Russian Federation, a circus performance is underway: the so-called referendum,” Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said Sunday. “Also taking part in the performance are 21,000 Russian troops, who with their guns are trying to prove the legality of the referendum.”

Russia raised the stakes Saturday when its forces, backed by helicopter gunships and armored vehicles, took control of the Ukrainian village of Strilkove and a key natural-gas distribution plant nearby - the first Russian military move into Ukraine beyond the Crimean Peninsula, which has 2 million residents.

The Russian forces later returned the village but kept control of the gas plant. On Sunday, Ukrainian soldiers were digging trenches and erecting barricades between the village and the gas plant.

“We will not let them advance further into Ukrainian territory,” said Serhiy Kuz, commander of a Ukrainian paratrooper battalion.

In a Sunday call to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry “raised strong concerns about the Russian military activities in Kherson Oblast yesterday and about the continuing provocations in eastern cities in Ukraine,” a senior U.S. State Department official said.

Despite the threat of sanctions, Putin has vigorously resisted calls to pull back in Crimea. At the United Nations on Saturday, Russia vetoed a Security Council resolution declaring the referendum illegal.

Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, brushed aside a warning from the leaders of the Group of Seven world powers of unspecified consequences for Russia’s violation of international law in Crimea, saying it would have no effect on Russia’s policies.

However, Putin spoke with Obama and supported a proposal from Germany to expand an international observer mission in Ukraine, the Kremlin said Sunday in a statement after the vote.

“The heads of state noted that despite the differences in their assessments, it was necessary to work together to find a way to stabilize the situation in Ukraine,” the statement said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who also spoke with Putin on Sunday, wants more observers sent to tense areas, particularly in eastern Ukraine, her spokesman said. Putin told Obama that such a mission would be welcome but would need to be extended to all regions in Ukraine, the Kremlin said.

In Donetsk, one of the main cities in eastern Ukraine, pro-Russia demonstrators called Sunday for a referendum similar to the one in Crimea.

In Kharkiv, several thousand pro-Russia demonstrators scuffled Sunday with police outside the governor’s office. After pushing against the thick ranks of Ukrainian police guarding the governor’s office for several minutes, the crowd marched to the Russian Consulate, carrying Russian flags and red banners that read “Russian Spring.”

In Sevastopol, the Crimean port where Russia leases a major naval base from Ukraine for $98 million a year, speakers blared the city anthem up and down the streets, but the military threat was not far away - a Russian naval warship still blocked the port’s outlet to the Black Sea, trapping Ukrainian boats.

At a polling station inside a historic school, tears came to Vladimir Lozovoy, a 75-year old retired Soviet naval officer, as he talked about his vote.

“I want to cry. I have finally returned to my motherland. It is an incredible feeling. This is the thing I have been waiting for for 23 years,” he said.

But Crimea’s large Muslim Tatar minority group - whose families had been forcibly removed from their homeland and sent to Central Asia during Soviet times - remained defiant.

The Crimea referendum “is a clown show, a circus,” Tatar activist Refat Chubarov said on Crimea’s Tatar television station. “This is a tragedy, an illegitimate government with armed forces from another country.”

The fate of Ukrainian soldiers trapped in their Crimean bases by pro-Russian forces was still uncertain. But Ukraine’s acting defense minister, Igor Tenyuk, was quoted as saying Sunday that an agreement had been reached with Russia to not block Ukrainian soldiers in Crimea through Friday. It was not clear exactly what that meant.

An announcement from the Russian Ministry of Defense said it had agreed to “a truce” to allow the Ukrainian forces a workweek to get back to the Ukrainian mainland.

Tenyuk, in an interview with Ukrainian Interfax news service, said Ukrainian troops would not leave Crimea.

He said Ukrainian combat readiness remains at its highest level, and that in the past few days, 40,000 Ukrainians had signed up for national guard duty.

Ethnic Ukrainians interviewed outside the Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral of Vladimir and Olga said they refused to take part in the referendum, calling it an illegal charade stage-managed by Moscow.

Vasyl Ovcharuk, a retired gas pipe layer, predicted dark days ahead for Crimea.

“This will end up in military action, in which peaceful people will suffer. And that means everybody,” he said. “Shells and bullets are blind.”

While the residents of Crimea were voting Sunday, Oleg Vorontsov was heeding a national call to arms. Outraged by what he called a “rigged referendum,” the 40-year-old approached a recruiting stand in central Kiev for Ukraine’s newly created national guard.

And yet, his anger was not solely directed at Moscow. He had plenty left for the Western powers that he said had courted Ukraine only to dither and demur when the going got tough.

“Sanctions against a few people? How is that going to help us against Russia?” laughed Vorontsov, owner of a small Internet cafe, who signed up to join a new force of 60,000 reservists that Kiev hopes will bolster Ukrainian defenses in the event of a full-blown war with Russia. “The Russians are taking a piece of our country, and where is the West? Europe and the United States have abandoned us.”

“We do not want to go to war, but if the Russians knew that the West would stand behind us, they would not have taken Crimea,” said Oleksandr Kress, a 29-year-old engineer who was also in line to sign up for the national guard. The government is taking men as young as 15 and as old as 45.

“But we know now that they don’t stand behind us,” Kress said. “We know now that we must help ourselves.”

Near Independence Square, where the hundreds of activists who challenged Yanukovych are still living in a makeshift tent city, walls were adorned Sunday with posters and signs calling for peace, as well as several railing against Putin. Accountants Irina Prischepa, 28, and Svetlana Chernykh, 34, stood in the square holding a sign that said: “Putin, hands off our Motherland.”

Both women thanked the West for its support thus far and praised the cool heads that have avoided a military clash.

“We want things to move faster, but this can only be solved diplomatically,” Prischepa said. “There is no other way.” Information for this article was contributed by John-Thor Dahlburg, Mike Eckel, Dalton Bennett,Yuras Karmanau, Jim Heintz, Maria Danilova, David Melendy, Matthew Lee, Raf Casert and Geir Moulson of The Associated Press; David M. Herszenhorn, Steven Lee Myers, Alison Smale, Michael R. Gordon, C.J. Chivers, Noah Sneider and Patrick Reeve of The New York Times; by Anthony Faiola of The Washington Post; and by Matthew Schoÿeld of the McClatchy Washington Bureau.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/17/2014