The Ukraine warns Russia

The BBC has an article by Daniel Sandford about the latest in the Ukraine:

Western nations have called on Russia to ease tensions in the Ukraine's Crimea region after armed men seized the local parliament and raised the Russian flag. Russia also scrambled fighter jets along its borders as part of military exercises it announced a day earlier. Moscow said it was willing to work with the West on averting a crisis, but warned foreign powers against taking decisions on behalf of Ukrainians.
Meanwhile, the ousted Ukrainian president is reported to be in Russia. Viktor Yanukovych plans to hold a news conference in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don soon, Russia's Ria news agency reports. Earlier, in his first statement since being voted out of office by MPs last week, Yanukovych said he had been "compelled to ask the Russian Federation to ensure my personal security from the actions of extremists" and that he still considered himself the legitimate president of the Ukraine.
It feels as though President Putin has thrown down a gauntlet to the new government in Kiev. Perhaps scrambling Russian fighter jets, granting asylum to Viktor Yanukovych, or tacitly backing the takeover by local Russians of Crimean government buildings do not appear to be connected. But, taken together, these events seem to add up to a message that Russia has the power to make life difficult for the victors in Kiev and is not prepared to be taken for granted.
What Russia says it wants, however, seems quite unrealistic. Its foreign ministry argued that the best way out of the Ukraine's crisis and the Crimean stand-off would be to go back to the compromise agreement signed last week. But that would seem to mean President Yanukovych returning to power.
Russia also wants reforms to suit all regions of the country, including, presumably, that referendum on Crimean autonomy. Russia says it wants to keep Ukraine united, is prepared to collaborate and won't intervene militarily. But how far is it prepared to ratchet up the confrontation if the new government in Kiev, or the West, object to its proposals?
Unidentified armed men entered the Crimean parliament in the regional capital Simferopol by force recently, and hoisted a Russian flag on the roof. They were cheered by a handful of pro-Russian demonstrators who gathered round the building, despite a police cordon.
"We've been waiting for this moment for twenty years," the protest leader said. "We want a united Russia." The men are believed to be still in the building, although it is not clear if they have made any demands or statements.
They did put up a sign reading Crimea is Russia and threw a flash grenade in response to questions from a journalist, The Associated Press news agency reported.
Western leaders were quick to urge Moscow and Crimean activists not to escalate tensions further. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he was "concerned about developments in the Crimea", and urged Russia "not to take any action that can escalate tension".
US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel told Russia "not to take any steps that could be misinterpreted, or lead to miscalculation, during a very delicate time".
Later, US Secretary of State John Kerry said Russia had reaffirmed it would respect the Ukraine's territorial integrity, but that the US would look for action to back up the statements.
Both British Prime Minister David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel voiced their concerns at a joint news conference in London.
Earlier, Ukrainian interim President Olexander Turchynov warned Russia that any movement of its Black Sea Fleet beyond its base in the Crimea would be seen as "military aggression".
The Crimea, the Ukraine's most ethnically divided region, says it will hold a referendum in May of 2014 for broader autonomous powers
"The dirty fingerprints of Russian President Vladimir Putin appear to be all over the tension and violence gripping the Crimean peninsula," says an editorial in the Ukraine's leading English-language Kyiv Post newspaper.
"We need solutions which would satisfy everyone, lower the tensions, and resolve the confrontation," writes Ivan Kapsamun in the centrist Day broadsheet.
"The main thing now for Kiev is not to be drawn into a violent conflict, exactly what the FSB (Russia's security service) wants to later justify the 'defence of the Russians'," Olexiy Haran argues in his blog on the pro-Maidan Ukrainska Pravda internet newspaper
"Such issues as the status of a republic, its independence, cannot and should not be decided by a majority principle. This should be resolved by consensus," thinks Yevhen Leshan in the Obozrevatel web resource.
"Constant air patrols are being carried out by fighter jets in the border regions," Russia's defence ministry told the Interfax news agency.
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a snap drill to test the combat readiness of troops in central and western Russia, near the border with Ukraine.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has stressed the need to implement an EU-brokered peace deal agreed between Yanukovych and opposition parties before his departure from office last week.
But John Kerry said later Yanukovych had left the post of president; the US vice-president had tried for about ten or twelve hours to get in touch with him after he fled Kiev, with no success.
The uncertainty in the Ukraine has sent its currency, the hryvnia, tumbling to a record low.
New Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk accused Yanukovych and his government of stripping the state coffers bare, telling parliament that billions of dollars had been transferred to offshore accounts in the past three years.
The International Monetary Fund said it had received a request for assistance from the new government, and would be sending a team to Kiev in the coming days. The city saw clashes erupt between Ukrainians who support the change of government and pro-Russians.
The Crimea, where ethnic Russians are in a majority, was transferred from Russia to the Ukraine in 1954.
Ethnic Ukrainians loyal to Kiev and Muslim Tatars, whose animus towards Russia stretches back to Stalin's deportations during World War Two, have formed an alliance to oppose any move back towards Moscow.
Russia, along with the US, UK, and France, pledged to uphold the territorial integrity of the Ukraine in a memorandum signed in 1994.

Rico says this is classic fuque de clusteur, and they'll all be lucky to avoid a shooting war...