Several days later, the soldiers handed over their post to a pro-secession militia. Some of these men carried whips. Technicians took the next step, removing Ukrainian networks from the air and replacing them with state-controlled channels from Moscow.
By last week, the transformation was complete. The media hub’s entrance was adorned with bright flags and banners. A young woman cheerfully urged journalists to be seated for a pro-secession news conference at what she now called, with a confident Orwellian flair, the Open Press Center — no matter that several television station signals had just been unplugged.
The switchover was one step in the abrupt shift in civic life on the Crimean Peninsula, where open dissent has been suppressed by the implicit threat of force. In a matter of days, the Kremlin has succeeded in recreating the constrained conditions of Russia’s own civic sphere in Crimea.
With a mix of targeted intimidation, an expansive military occupation by unmistakably elite Russian units and many of the trappings of the election-season carnivals that have long accompanied rigged ballots across the old Soviet world, Crimea has been swept almost instantaneously into the Kremlin’s fold.
This has happened well ahead of the referendum set for Sunday, after which, barring an extraordinary surprise, the peninsula’s interim authorities, led by a previously unsuccessful politician nicknamed the Goblin, will announce that its citizens have voted to leave Ukraine and seek a place in President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia.
On Saturday, Ukraine’s government reported that the intimidation had taken a possibly more worrisome turn, saying that Russian forces had landed by helicopter to seize a gas plant just beyond the boundaries of the Crimean region. Ukrainian troops took up positions outside the gas plant, which is on a sand bar to the east of the Crimean Peninsula and south of the Ukrainian mainland, according to Unian, a Ukrainian news service, which quoted local police officers. The news agency did not say whether shots had been fired.
Russia has also massed significant forces in the regions bordering Ukraine, raising fears that it could be preparing to occupy parts of eastern or southern Ukraine.
Here in Crimea, the organizers of secession have relied repeatedly on strong-arm tactics, familiar to Mr. Putin’s opponents at home, in order to project power to anyone who might resist a realignment of the territory.
Organizers of counterprotests have been threatened and have in some cases disappeared. Armed men in masks patrol around strategic sites.
Crimean journalists have been ordered not to describe the soldiers on their soil as Russian or to use the word “occupation.” And foreign and local journalists have been beaten and had their materials confiscated by uniformed men who are not officially connected to any government.
Civilian airline flights to and from Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, have been blocked. The Berkut riot police, disbanded in February under accusations of brutality by Ukraine, the state they once served, have regrouped in Crimea, where they stand as enforcers of the new authorities’ will.
All the while, Ukrainian government centers are blockaded by a mix of Russian troops and men identifying themselves as their supporters.
This has played out while thickets of signs declaring “Together with Russia” have sprouted along roadways, urging citizens to vote to leave Ukraine.
Whether this intensive social and political pressure is even necessary is subject to debate.
Crimea, once part of Russia, has a strong historical and linguistic alignment with its Slavic neighbors to the east; many residents consider themselves Russian and approve of rejoining the revived Russian state.
But the Kremlin is taking no chances. It has ensured that most anyone who might publicly resist secession is marginalized or discouraged.
On Monday, roughly 30 men in camouflage and carrying clubs pushed into Simferopol’s military hospital, walking the corridors and telling Ukrainian military officers there to leave.
The men stood in the hospital’s entrance for hours, checking documents of anyone who arrived. The hospital’s director, Lt. Col. Evgeny A. Pivovar, a Ukrainian Army surgeon, said the men barred him from his own office. “They said, ‘You don’t work here anymore,’ ” he said.
Though the intruders made no explicit threats, he said, it was not necessary. “Their presence here, it was understood,” he said glumly.
The colonel’s wife is from Crimea, and the couple has a young daughter. He said he expects he will leave the peninsula for Ukraine. His family will probably stay behind. “I do not know what will be after the 16th,” he said.
The campaign of intimidation, which seems intended to squeeze out Crimea’s already relatively small population of active dissenters, is already having an effect.
Pro-Ukrainian activists have been flowing out of Crimea, frightened by an atmosphere of mounting aggression and growing indications that the police will no longer protect them.
“The security services here have gone over completely to the side of the bandits,” said Sergei Makrenyuk, an organizer of the Crimean branch of the pro-revolutionary EuroMaidan group
Mr. Makrenyuk, 35, fled Crimea on Tuesday, after his name and address were read out at a pro-Russian rally in his hometown, Feodosiya, with calls for the crowd to go to his house.
He said that more than a dozen other activists involved in pro-European demonstrations left the peninsula last week. “Everyone already understands that we aren’t going to be able to return,” he said by phone on his way to Kiev with his wife and children.
Their decision was in part informed by the events of last Sunday, when two pro-Ukraine activists — Andriy Shchekun and Anatoliy Kovalskiy — were seized by pro-Russian militia members at Simferopol’s train station.
Sergei Kovalskiy, Mr. Kovalskiy’s son, said that the two men, who are prominent in the Ukrainian language and cultural movement here, were taken by people identifying themselves as members of Russian Unity, the political party headed by Crimea’s new prime minister, Sergei Aksyonov.
Whether this was an arrest or an abduction depends on each Crimean’s point of view.
On Monday, Mr. Aksyonov said that Crimean security forces were holding Mr. Kovalskiy for possessing large quantities of “provocative materials.” Mr. Kovalskiy, he added, will be held through the referendum. Then he might be set free.
“He will be released if he will not conduct undermining activity on the territory of Crimea,” Mr. Aksyonov told the KrimInform news agency, another new feature of Crimea’s news media scene, launched by Russia’s state-controlled Itar-Tass.
The prime minister’s mention of “Crimean security services” instead of self-defense militias illustrated a blurring of lines between former law-enforcement bodies and the groups of armed pro-secession men that have organized this month.
In the past two weeks, areas formally under Ukrainian administration have become dominated by vigilante groups that appear answerable to Mr. Aksyonov personally and that openly collaborate with the Russian military.
As the strength of these semiformal structures has grown, the local police’s authority has become flimsy.
On Simferopol’s streets, traffic police are now accompanied by masked men in assorted camouflage, Kalashnikov rifles in hand.
Buses deliver pro-Russian Cossacks to blockade government offices, providing yet another reserve of loyalist muscle.
Other pressures are more subtle. Anna Andrievskaya, a senior correspondent for the Crimean edition of Argument Nedeli, a widely read Russian newspaper, said that on the day the engineers reconfigured the television tower, she and her editor in chief resigned.
The resignations, she said, became necessary after their editors in Moscow informed them that they were forbidden to refer to the armed men appearing around Crimea as Russian troops or to make any use of the word “occupation.”
“Crimea is not yet part of Russia, at least not on paper,” she said. “But freedom is already curtailed.”
Original Article
Source: nytimes.com/
Author: C. J. CHIVERS and PATRICK REEVELL
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