BALTIMORE, Maryland February 26, 2014 - Even as Russian strongman Vladimir Putin ordered military units in Western Russia, including those nearest to Ukraine, to Undergo Emergency Training Exercises, some 5,000 Crimean Tatars in Simferopol staged a protest backing pro-western demonstrators in Ukraine's capital city of Kiev. The Tatar protesters rallied outside of the Crimean Parliament building in Simferopol in the autonomous Crimea Republic. The unexpectedly large outpouring of pro-western support caught police by surprise, and as they struggled to keep them separate from a smaller pro-Russian gathering, the pro-western group stormed into the Parliament building. Fighting broke-out and there is a report that one protester was killed and several others injured.
Inside the Parliament Building the legislative body, said to be controlled by pro-Russian Tatars, was in plenary session debating a proposal for the republic to begin to break away from Ukraine. Yesterday, the speaker of the Parliament, Volodymyr Konstantynov, told a Crimean newspaper in Ankara, Turkey, that events were inevitably spinning toward a break with Ukraine. Today, his organization released a statement that tried to scale that statement back.
Meanwhile, the American Deputy Secretary of State, William Burns, visited today with heads of the new Government in Kiev. And the government announced that it will name a slate of new leaders today. One spokesman for the new government has been Vitali Klitschko, the former heavyweight boxing champ who led the opposition party in Ukraine during months of protests in 2013 and early this year that culminated last week with the ouster of Viktor Yanukovych as president. A current flash point between the new Ukrainian government and Russia was Monday's announcement that the new government had issued an arrest warrant for Yanukovych for allegedly ordering Kiev police to fire on demonstrators in Kiev. Some 80 protesters are said to have been killed and the international group, Amnesty International, has now urged that those responsible for these deaths be prosecuted.
Vitali Klitschko is in favor of the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the European Union, according to Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia added that Klitschko sees the European Union as Ukraine's "model for our future political and economic development." He believes former President Viktor Yanukovych and his government were "deliberately destroying the integration (into Europe) prospects of Ukraine"[76] and that Ukrainian politicians have no right to let them "rule after 2015". Klitschko is also in favour of NATO-Ukraine cooperation. obama has not publicly favored the integration of Georgia or Ukraine into NATO because he fears such a stand would irritate Putin. President Bush had favored the inclusion of both countries into NATO.
Klitschko, who ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of Kiev, is mentioned as a candidate for President.
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