Courtesy of Mish.
News is fast and furious in Ukraine.
- Putin received approval to send Russian troops into Ukraine from Russian parliament.
- Russian troops seized Crimea
- Russia anti-submarine warships appear of Ukraine coast near Sevastopol in violation of naval agreement
- Ukraine troops are on combat notice.
- UN Security Council meets.
- Obama warns Russia
The Telegraph has a live blog on Ukraine going with some of those headlines and this image of Kharkiv in which protesters have raised the Russian flag.
Russian Troops Seize Crimea
Reuters reports Troops Seize Crimea.
Talk of confrontation or outright war spread rapidly across Ukraine, with pro-Moscow demonstrators raising the Russian flag above government buildings in several cities and anti-Russian politicians calling for mobilization.
Troops with no uniform insignia but clearly Russian – some in vehicles with Russian number plates – have already seized Crimea, an isolated peninsula in the Black Sea where Moscow has a large military presence in the headquarters of its Black Sea Fleet. Kiev’s new authorities have been powerless to intervene.
Western capitals scrambled for a response, but so far this has been limited to angry words from Washington and its European allies.
So far there has been no sign of Russian military action in Ukraine outside Crimea, the only part of the country with a Russian ethnic majority, which has often voiced separatist aims.
As tension built on Saturday, demonstrations occasionally turned violent in eastern cities, where most people, though ethnically Ukrainian, are Russian speakers, and many support deposed President Viktor Yanukovich and Moscow.
Demonstrators flew Russian flags at government buildings in the cities of Kharkiv, Donetsk, Odessa and Dnipropetrovsk.
In Kharkiv, scores of people were wounded in clashes when thousands of pro-Russian activists stormed the regional government headquarters, and fought pitched battles with a smaller number of supporters of Ukraine’s new authorities….
