“I am ashamed,” the Russian said, before letting out the longest and most elaborate profanity I have ever heard. We were standing in the warm Crimean sunshine on Sunday, next to a Ukrainian military base in Perevalnoe, outside Simferopol, the regional capital, surrounded by soldiers, screaming protestors, and television crews. The swearing Russian was a journalist from Moscow, who had just got a tongue-lashing from his editor for calling the Russian soldiers Russian soldiers. “He said we have to refer to them as ‘a friendly volunteer self-defense force,’ ” the journalist bellowed. “Is that what they look like to you?” He crowned the question with another string of swears.
The soldiers—with Kalashnikovs and light antitank missiles, wearing balaclavas and brand-new insignia-free uniforms—certainly did not look like volunteers. Hundreds of them surrounded the perimeter of the Crimean base. Some guarded the concrete fence; others wandered through the bushes of a nearby field, bumping into locals.
“What are you doing here?” an old Ukrainian woman screamed at one of the Russian soldiers. “Your own government is humiliating you. If what you are doing is O.K., then open up your faces, show us who you are.” The soldier turned his back. But, slightly farther up the road, his comrades received a much warmer welcome from a small crowd of supporters. “You are the saviors, you are our boys,” a woman waving a Russian flag shouted, while those around her cheered, “Russia, Russia!”
The road ended at a gate, behind which a dozen Ukrainian soldiers stood, watching the takeover of their base. Standing in front of them was a priest, and nearby a small, nervous man was reading loudly from the Old Testament. As the pro-Russian crowd down the road got noisier, his voice sped up and stiffened; an old nun came up to him and stroked his arm. “Vitya, calm down,” she said. “Use your monotone voice, remember?”
“I pray as I can,” Vitya snapped back. “We all pray as we can. Except some of us pray to the devil at the Red Square.”
Since Sunday, Russia has tightened its grip on the Crimean Peninsula. Ukrainian television has reported that more than fifteen thousand Russian troops are now in Crimea; Ukrainian and Russian ships are in an increasingly tense standoff in the port of Sebastopol. On Monday, the Interfax news agency reported that Russia’s Black Sea Fleet had given the Ukrainian forces in Crimea an ultimatum: surrender by 5 A.M. on Tuesday or face a military assault.
Many Ukrainian troops in Crimea have already been forced to switch sides; some have even taken an oath of loyalty to Russia. Timur, a twenty-nine-year-old officer in the Ukrainian Army, told me that he had refused to sign a piece of paper that Russians presented to the officers in his small unit. “We were ten people on the shift, and ninety Russians showed up and told us to lay down our arms,” he said. “We did.”
Most of Timur’s fellow-officers signed the paper, but he was so upset by the Russian invasion that he wasn’t even sure what it was asking for—allegiance to Russia, or to a Russian-backed regime in Crimea. He walked away from his base, and, he told me, he has since gotten threatening phone calls from people who claim to work for the pro-Moscow administration in Crimea. “They say I still have a chance to go back, and if not my family will be in trouble,” Timur told me. “I don’t want to go—but what do I do? What will they do to me?”
No one here has answers. Simferopol is bursting with tensions and is awash with rumors. As night fell, a few dozen men gathered along a potholed road outside Timur’s house to organize an overnight patrol of the neighborhood. Unarmed, they spoke quietly, divvying up the streets. “Our main goal is not to allow provocation,” one of the leaders told his men.
The neighborhood-watch group was not looking for Russian soldiers but, rather, for other visitors from across the border; the men had received information that Cossacks were entering Crimea. Iskander Babilov, who was a teen-ager when the Soviet Union collapsed, told me that this was no surprise: in all the conflicts in post-Soviet states, Cossacks and other mercenaries from the Caucasus often trailed behind the regular Russian Army, further exacerbating existing social divisions and helping to turn neighbors against one another.
“Their strategy is not to have the Army fight us,” Babilov said. “It is to have us fight each other, so they can say that the Army needs to stay to keep the peace.” Babilov is among the leaders of the Crimean Tatars—a Muslim community, indigenous to the peninsula, which has a long history of bad blood with Russia. For centuries, the Tatars were persecuted by the Tsars, and in 1944 Stalin deported millions of Crimean Tatars to Central Asia.
Babilov said that the arrival of Russian troops has already damaged the region’s fragile ethnic balance. The danger, he says, is that the Russians—who make up sixty per cent of the population—the Ukrainians, and the Tatars will all turn against each other. “We must get along if we are to avoid bloodshed,” Babilov said. But the atmosphere of this nervous peninsula has already been polluted by hateful rhetoric reminiscent of that used in the nineteen-nineties, when the dissolution of the Soviet Union unleashed pent-up ethnic tension across its vast territories.
“I don’t mind Ukrainians in principle, but events in Kiev showed their true Fascist face,” Valentina Nikolaeva, a seventy-two-year-old Russian Crimean, told me. “They want to exterminate us.” Every day, she joins pro-Kremlin demonstrators, who gather under a statue of Lenin in front of a local administration building. “Thank God for Putin,” she said. “He is the only one who will protect us.” Nikolaeva told me that she likes her Tatar neighbors, a comment that infuriated a man standing next to us, who shouted, in response, “Tatars are animals! They are waiting for a chance to kill us.” Nikolaeva argued back, but soon she and the man were surrounded by others, all of them shouting, and she was completely drowned out.
Above: Members of the Russian armed forces stand guard around the Ukrainian military base in the village of Perevalnoe; March 2, 2014. Photograph by Bulent Doruk/Anadolu Agency/Getty.
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