By Anshel Pfeffer
Reuters and The Associated Press
3/7/14

Russian soldiers storm Ukrainian military base in Crimea

Standoff resolved without a shot being fired, a witness said; Crimea's pro-Russia premier say on Ukrainian TV that all is calm at the post.

Russian troops on Friday stormed a Ukranian military base 5 kilometers from the Ukranian city of Sevastopol, located on the Black Sea coast of the Crimean peninsula. The standoff was resolved without a shot being fired, a witness said.

According to early reports, members of a pro-Russia militia used a truck to break though the gate of the base. The truck got stuck at the gate, and Russia soldiers climbed over it. Some 70 Ukrainian troops were said to still be holding out in the bunkers. There were no reports of shots being fired.

A Ukrainian military official, Vladislav Seleznyov, told Reuters by telephone that the armed men took over the base without any shooting and that no one was hurt. Another Ukrainian official told Reuters at the post that he was now mediating between the Ukrainian forces and the armed group inside, and that no arms had been seized. Russia now has 30,000 troops in Ukraine’s Crimea region, according to Ukrainian border guards, nearly twice the previous figure given by the government in Kiev.

Meanwhile, Russia said on Friday that any American sanctions imposed against Moscow over the Ukraine crisis would boomerang back on the United States and urged Washington not to damage bilateral ties.

In a phone conversation with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov “warned against hasty and reckless steps capable of causing harm to Russian-American relations, particularly … sanctions, which would inevitably hit the United States like a boomerang,” the Foreign Ministry said.

Canada, home to more than 1 million people of Ukrainian descent, imposed its own travel bans Friday on people threatening Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said the ban was to protest Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “illegal military occupation” of Crimea.

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