Staring Down a Russian Rifle in #Belbek

Some drama today, from Simon Shuster, at Time, "The Standoff at Belbek: Inside the First Clash of the Second Crimean War":

Our hero - Colonel Yuri #Mamchur, commander of the brigade of Tactical Aviation in #Belbek, #Crimea pic.twitter.com/Xb72MUFVDg

— ЄВРОМАЙДАН (@euromaidan) March 4, 2014

The Ukrainian troops kept the bonfires burning all night on Monday, kicking stones into the embers and waiting for the sun to rise over the Belbek air force base in southern Ukraine. Five days had passed since the start of the siege against them and the strain on the troops was starting to show. The previous day, the Russian forces surrounding their base had issued another ultimatum – surrender your weapons that night and sign an oath of allegiance to Russia or face an assault by 5:00 a.m. The commanders had refused. Some of the troops had defected. The rest stood around the garrison, smoking cigarettes and twitching when the logs popped in the fires. They only understood that the Russians had been bluffing when the roosters started to crow.

The next bluff came soon after, and it marked a turning point in the week-old conflict that has brought Russia and Ukraine to the edge of a fratricidal war. Just before morning reveille, Colonel Yuli Mamchur, the base commander, got word from one of his lieutenants that the Russian officer in charge of the siege, a lieutenant colonel of the special forces who only identified himself as Dima, had called again. His terms were the same, only the deadline was different – surrender by 4:00 pm on Tuesday or the Russians would cut off the power and the gas lines to the base. “What they’re trying to do is make us snap,” Mamchur told TIME. “It’s a mind game.” He decided to call Dima back. Without consulting his ranking officers, Mamchur told the Russian officer that the men under his command – Ukraine’s 204th Tactical Aviation Brigade – was about to march on the Belbek air field that the Russians had occupied. Then he hung up the phone.

The plan he had was reckless if not suicidal. He wanted his men to leave their Kalashnikovs at the base, get into formation and march behind him into the Russian checkpoint about a kilometer up the road. Practically all of them volunteered, but he left half his men behind to guard the base and took the other half with him in a column. He intended to answer the Russian ultimatums with his own psychological attack. His men would be unarmed, and leading their column would be a flagman with a Soviet relic – the banner of the 62nd Fighter Aviation Regiment that had been based in Belbek during World War II. Any soldier born in the Soviet Union would have heard the stories of its legendary pilots, the ones who had taken on the Nazi Luftwaffe in 1941 then went on to guard the skies above the Yalta Conference in 1945. Mamchur reckoned that no soldier with any respect for the heroes of the Soviet Union would shoot at a column carrying that banner.

He guessed right. As he approached the Russian checkpoint with his men trailing behind, three troops came forward and raised the barrels of their assault rifles. They ordered Mamchur to stop, and when he refused, they began firing bursts into the air, one after another, screaming that they would shoot to kill. They were the first shots fired since the Russian occupation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula began last week, so at the sound of the gunfire, the column wobbled. Some of the men ducked but they all kept marching. Only when Mamchur was a few paces from the Russian troops with a Kalashnikov pointed directly at his face did he order his men to stop.

What followed was a stand-off lasting well into the afternoon. Mumchar put forward a simple demand. “It is our duty to the constitution of Ukraine to guard this base,” he said. The Russians could remain in control, as no one had the fire power to evict them. But the Ukrainians insisted on taking their positions beside the fighter jets and radar stations of their occupied base. The Russians asked for two hours to consult with their commanding officers, and the Ukrainian brigade began to wait in the middle of the road. All around them, in the bushes of the surrounding fields, Russian snipers and machine gunners had taken up positions, training their sights directly at the Ukrainians...

Continue reading.

Also at London's Daily Mail, "The first shots of the Ukraine crisis were fired, but Colonel Yuli stands defiant: IAN BIRRELL reports from another dramatic day in Crimea."