World

PERTH/MELBOURNE — Authorities ruled out any link between debris picked up on an Australian beach and a missing Malaysian jetliner on Thursday as a tropical cyclone again threatened to hamper a 26-nation air, surface and underwater search of the Indian Ocean.

The debris, found on Wednesday on a beach at the southern tip of Western Australia state, was seen as the first lead since April 4 when authorities detected what they believed was a signal from the black box of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board.

But it took Australian authorities less than a day to analyse detailed photographs of the beached debris, no description of which was given, and dismiss the possibility that it may be linked to the plane.

“We’re not seeing anything in this that would lead us to believe that it is from a Boeing aircraft,” Australian Transport Safety Bureau Commissioner Martin Dolan  of the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

That puts the focus of the search, the most expensive in aviation history, back on US navy undersea drone Bluefin-21, which will soon finish scouring a 10-square-kilometre stretch of seabed where the acoustic pings were located.

Authorities have said if Bluefin-21 fails to find a trace of the plane in its initial target search area, some 2,000km northwest of the Western Australian city of Perth, it will be redeployed to new areas, still to be determined.

On Wednesday, Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters that authorities would be “increasing the assets that are available for deep-sea search” and that his government was seeking help from state oil company Petronas which has expertise in deep-sea exploration.

Search authorities would need to “regroup and restrategise” if nothing was found in the current search zone, but the search would “always continue”, Hussein said.

Australian search officials said weather conditions may impact the search effort after the air component was suspended for the previous two days because of heavy rain, strong winds, rough seas related to related to Tropical Cyclone Jack.

Up to 11 military aircraft and 11 ships were expected to help with the day’s search although authorities would monitor the weather before the sorties commenced.

ANSAN, South Korea — Thousands of mourners paid tearful respects Wednesday at a temporary memorial to the hundreds of student victims of South Korea’s ferry disaster, as the grim search for bodies entered a second week.

The confirmed death toll stood at 150, but 152 were still unaccounted for, their bodies believed trapped in the inverted, submerged ship that sank a week ago in circumstances that have yet to be fully explained.

As the relatives of the missing began their daily vigil at the harbour on Jindo island, where bodies recovered from the disaster site are brought, others converged on a temporary memorial to the victims in Ansan, 320 kilometres to the north.

Ansan has become a focal point of national mourning. The city is home to the Danwon High School which had 352 students and a dozen teachers on the Sewol when it capsized.

Nearly 280 students are among the dead and missing.

The memorial, set up in an indoor sports stadium, was opened Wednesday and comprised a giant altar in the form of a terraced bank of flowers — white, yellow and green chrysanthemums — among which rested the framed pictures and names of students whose funerals have already taken place.

Above the floral wall a large banner carried the message: “We pray for the souls of the departed.”

Mourners, clutching single white chrysanthemums handed out by volunteers, wept, bowed and prayed as they stood before the altar before placing their flowers below the students’ pictures.

There was anger as well as grief. One woman railed tearfully against the authorities for not saving more people, while one large floral tribute carried a sash with the simple message: “I hate the Republic of Korea.”

Among the 6,500 mourners who passed through the memorial during the day, were many schoolchildren in uniform, some of whom broke down and had to be helped out of the stadium.

Across the road in Danwon High School, bouquets of flowers had been placed on the desks of empty classrooms, while sad, handwritten messages of loss and remembrance were plastered on walls and windows.

Hong Hyun-ju, a grief counsellor working with the school, said the teaching staff was as traumatised as the student body.

North Korea, which has barely referenced the ferry disaster over the past week, sent its condolences Wednesday via a Red Cross channel used for inter-Korean communications.

The message voiced sorrow that “so many passengers, including young students, died or went missing,” the South’s Unification Ministry said.

In Jindo harbour, the latest bodies recovered from the ferry were taken to a small tented village set up to manage the process of identifying the bodies.

“I’m here to help you recognise the dead,” a forensic official told a group of relatives called to the site because ID documents or distinguishing features indicated their family member might be among those brought ashore.

“We have cleaned the bodies, but did not take their clothes and socks off so that you can recognise them more easily,” the official said, before leading them into a separate, closed-off section.

Each positive identification was marked by a piercing cry of anguished recognition and an outpouring of grief from the family members — most of them middle-aged parents.

The Sewol’s captain, Lee Joon-seok, and six crew members are under arrest with two other crew taken into police custody on Tuesday.

On Wednesday morning prosecutors raided a host of businesses affiliated with the ferry operator, the Chonghaejin Marine Company.

The raid was part of a probe into “overall corruption in management”, Kim Hoe-jong, a prosecutor on the case, told AFP.

More than 70 executives and other people connected with Chonghaejin and its affiliates have been issued 30-day travel bans while they are investigated on possible charges ranging from criminal negligence to embezzlement.

PERTH, Australia — Australia said Wednesday cost was not a concern in the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, after the mini-submarine plumbing the depths of the Indian Ocean for wreckage ended its ninth mission empty-handed.

Searchers were also investigating “unidentified material” which washed up on the country’s southwest coast to see if it was linked to the Boeing 777, which vanished on March 8 with 239 people aboard.

But officials cautioned it may be unconnected to the plane.

Australia is leading the multinational search, and bearing many of the costs of the mission expected to be the most expensive in aviation history.

“There will be some issues of costs into the future but this is not about costs,” Defence Minister David Johnston told reporters in Canberra.

“We want to find this aircraft. We want to say to our friends in Malaysia and China this is not about cost, we are concerned to be seen to be helping them in a most tragic circumstance.”

China, whose citizens made up two-thirds of the passengers, and Malaysia are among eight countries including Australia which have committed planes or ships to the Indian Ocean search.

The plane was mysteriously diverted during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

With no confirmed sightings of debris on the surface so far, the search moved underwater nearly two weeks ago but has yet to find any sign of the aircraft.

Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC), which is organising the search, said the Australian Transport Safety Bureau was examining photographs of the material which washed ashore for any link to the missing jet.

“It’s sufficiently interesting for us to take a look at the photographs,” safety bureau Chief Commissioner Martin Dolan told broadcaster CNN, describing the object as appearing to be sheet metal with rivets.

But he added a note of caution. “The more we look at it, the less excited we get.”

Speaking to reporters in Canberra, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said searchers still believed the plane crashed in the Indian Ocean.

“Our expert advice is that the aircraft went down somewhere in the Indian Ocean where they have identified a probable impact zone which is about 700 kilometres long, about 80 kilometres wide,” he said.

Abbott said based on the detections from what Australia still believed was the plane’s black box flight recorder, an underwater search area of just under 400 square kilometres was being scoured.

“We haven’t finished the search, we haven’t found anything yet in the area that we’re searching, but the point I make is that Australia will not rest until we have done everything we humanly can to get to the bottom of this mystery,” he said.

The JACC said the unmanned mini-submarine looking for the plane on the seabed had scanned more than 80 per cent of its target zone using sonar and was now on its 10th dive.

“No contacts of interest have been found to date,” it said.

The torpedo-shaped autonomous underwater vehicle called Bluefin-21 is searching an area at least 4,500 metres deep defined by a 10-kilometre radius around a detection of a signal believed to be from the black box and heard on April 8.

‘Reasonable hope’ 

A surface search involving up to 10 military aircraft and 12 ships was also scheduled for Wednesday.

JACC later suspended the air search due to bad weather, but said the ships would continue their work.

The visual hunt covers an area totalling about 37,948 square kilometres some 855 kilometres northwest of Perth.

Johnston said that if the Bluefin-21 failed to spot wreckage the search would move into a new phase, but Canberra was committed to the task.

“We move to the next phase which is a more intensive single sideband sonar-type programme, I suspect, but let’s take advice of the experts as to where we go forward,” he said.

Abbott said Australia would not abandon the search and let down the families of the six Australians and 233 other people on board “by likely surrendering while there is reasonable hope of finding something”.

“At the moment we are conducting an underwater search with the best equipment that is currently available,” he said.

“If at the end of that period, we find nothing, we are not going to abandon the search. We may well re-think the search, but we will not rest until we have done everything we can to solve this mystery.”

SLAVYANSK, Ukraine  — Russia issued a sharp warning on Wednesday that it will strike back if its “legitimate interests” in Ukraine are attacked, raising the stakes in the Cold War-like duel with the United States over the former Soviet republic’s future.

“If we are attacked, we would certainly respond,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told state-controlled RT television.

“If our interests, our legitimate interests, the interests of Russians have been attacked directly, like they were in South Ossetia for example, I do not see any other way but to respond in accordance with international law,” he said, referring to Russia’s armoured invasion of Georgia in 2008.

Moscow also insisted that Kiev withdraw the forces it has sent into eastern Ukraine to dislodge pro-Russian rebels who have seized control of government buildings in several towns.

Both Kiev and Washington believe the current crisis is being deliberately fuelled by Russian President Vladimir Putin in a bid to restore former Soviet glory.

The Kremlin has an estimated 40,000 Russian troops poised on Ukraine’s eastern border, prompting Washington on Wednesday to start deploying 600 US troops to boost NATO’s defences in eastern European states neighbouring Ukraine.

The first unit of 150 US soldiers arrived in Poland on Wednesday, with the remainder arriving in Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia in the coming days.

 Journalists held 

Reports of two journalists — an American and a Ukrainian — being held in the flashpoint rebel-held town of Slavyansk have done nothing to ease the mounting tensions.

The US State Department said it was “deeply concerned about the reports of a kidnapping of a US citizen journalist in Slavyansk, Ukraine, reportedly at the hands of pro-Russian separatists”.

The town was also the source of gunfire that damaged a Ukrainian military reconnaissance plane on Tuesday, and the site of a crime scene for two bodies that Ukraine’s acting president, Oleksandr Turchynov, said had been “brutally tortured”.

One of the two victims was believed to be a local politician and member of Turchynov’s party, which the president used as justification to relaunch “anti-terrorist” operations against the insurgents on Tuesday.

Deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Yarema said security forces had been activated “to liquidate all the groups currently operating in Kramatorsk, Slavyansk and the other towns in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions”, according to the Interfax Ukraine news agency.

The spiralling violence — coupled with America and Russia both accusing each other of inflaming the situation through the use of proxies in Ukraine — has scuppered a Geneva accord agreed last week between Ukraine, Russia and the West which was meant to move Ukraine away from the brink of civil war.

Trading blame 

Russia said it wants Kiev to pull back its army units and start a “genuine internal Ukrainian dialogue involving all of the country’s regions”.

Lavrov accused the US of orchestrating the new offensive, noting that it was announced immediately after a two-day visit from US Vice President Joe Biden to Kiev.

“The Americans are running the show,” he told RT.

There were no immediate reports of any confrontation between the Ukrainian military and the pro-Moscow fighters.

In Slavyansk on Wednesday, the streets were calm, with locals walking about as usual.

A handful of rebels wearing camouflage gear and ski masks but with no apparent weapons stood outside the barricaded town hall they are occupying.

In front of the building were three photos of militants killed in a weekend attack on a nearby roadblock that the separatists have blamed on pro-Kiev ultra-nationalists.

The local rebel leader, Vyacheslav Ponomaryov, who styles himself as Slavyansk’s “mayor” told a news conference that the two journalists being held were unharmed.

The American journalist is Simon Ostrovsky of Vice News, who used to be employed by AFP in Azerbaijan. The Ukrainian is Irma Krat, who appears to work for her own pro-Kiev outlet.

Ponomaryov asserted that Ostrovsky “is not being detained, was not abducted, has not been arrested” and claimed he was “working” in one of the rebel-occupied buildings.

However, the Twitter feed of the normally prolific journalist has been inactive for over a day.

Vice News said in an online statement that it was “aware of the situation, and is in contact with the US State Department and other appropriate government authorities to secure the safety and security of our friend and colleague, Simon Ostrovsky”.

The State Department’s spokeswoman Jen Psaki condemned the abductions and said in a statement: “We call on Russia to use its influence with these groups to secure the immediate and safe release of all hostages in eastern Ukraine.”

Washington has also underlined its worry about “the lack of positive Russian steps to de-escalate” the crisis.

Sanctions, on top of those already imposed on President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, will follow if no progress is made soon, it warned.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has acknowledged his nation’s economy was facing an “unprecedented challenge” with recession looming, but Russia has nonetheless dismissed the threat of sanctions and insists it has the right to protect the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine.

JINDO, South Korea — The confirmed death toll from South Korea’s ferry disaster rose sharply to more than 120 Tuesday as divers speeded up the grim task of recovering bodies from the submerged ship and police took two more of its crew into custody.

Better weather and calm seas spurred their efforts but underwater visibility was still very poor, forcing divers to grope their way blindly though the corridors and cabins of the ferry that capsized and sank last Wednesday.

Nearly one week into one of South Korea’s worst peacetime disasters, close to 200 of the 476 people who were aboard the 6,825-tonne Sewol — most of them schoolchildren — are still unaccounted for.

The official toll stood at 121, with 181 still missing.

Distraught families of victims gathered in the morning at the harbour on Jindo Island — not far from the disaster site — awaiting the increasingly frequent arrival of boats with bodies.

In the initial days after the Sewol went down, their anger was focused on the pace of the rescue effort.

With all hope of finding any survivors essentially gone, this has turned to growing impatience with the effort to locate and retrieve the bodies of those trapped.

‘I just want my son back’ 

“I just want my son back,” said the father of one missing student. “I need to be able to hold him and say goodbye. I can’t bear the idea of him in that cold, dark place.”

The disaster has profoundly shocked South Korea, a proudly modernised nation that thought it had left behind large-scale accidents of this type.

The sense of national grief is accompanied by an equally deep but largely unfocused anger that has been vented towards pretty much anyone in authority.

Coastguard officials have been slapped and punched, senior politicians — including the prime — pushed and heckled, and rescue teams criticised for their slow response.

If there is a chief hate figure, it is the ferry’s captain Lee Joon-seok, who was arrested at the weekend and charged with criminal negligence and abandoning his passengers.

Six members of his crew are also under arrest and prosecutors said two more were taken into police custody on Tuesday.

President Park Geun-hye, who faced a hostile crowd when she met relatives on Jindo last week, has described the actions of Lee and his crew as being “tantamount to murder”.

Four of the detained crew were paraded — heads bowed and faces hidden — before TV cameras on Tuesday, and asked why only one of the Sewol’s 46 life rafts had been deployed.

“We tried to gain access to the rafts but the whole ship was already tilted too much,” one of them responded.

The Sewol capsized after making a sharp right turn — leading experts to suggest its cargo manifest might have shifted, causing it to list beyond a critical point of return.

The large death toll has partly been attributed to the captain’s instruction for passengers to stay where they were for around 40 minutes after the ferry ran into trouble.

By the time the evacuation order came, the ship was listing so badly that escape was almost impossible.

A transcript released Sunday of the crew’s final communications with marine transport control illustrated the sense of panic and confusion on the bridge before the ferry sank.

Captain Lee has insisted he acted in the passengers’ best interest, delaying the order to abandon ship because he feared people would be swept away and drowned.

Tough task for divers 

Nearly 750 divers, mostly coastguard and military, are now involved in the operation.

“The weather is better, but it’s still very difficult for the divers who are essentially fumbling for bodies in the silted water,” a coastguard official told reporters.

A priority for Tuesday was to access the ferry’s main dining hall.

“We believe there are many bodies there as the accident took place in the morning when students must have been eating breakfast,” the official said.

Of the 476 people on board the Sewol, 352 were students from the Danwon High School in Ansan city just south of Seoul, who were on an organised trip to the holiday island of Jeju.

Among the bodies recovered so far were those of three foreign nationals — believed to be a Russian and two Chinese.

Giant floating cranes have been at the disaster site off the southern coast for days, but many relatives remain opposed to raising the ferry before all the bodies have been removed.

PERTH, Australia — A US submarine drone will keep scouring the Indian Ocean floor for traces of a missing Malaysian jetliner after it finishes its current targeted search, Australian authorities told Reuters as a tropical cyclone suspended the air search.

Authorities are under growing pressure to decide their next course of action as the Bluefin-21 drone nears the end of its first sweep of remote seabed which authorities believe is the most likely resting place of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 which vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board.

The Bluefin-21 is expected to finish its targeted search of a 10-square-kilometre stretch of ocean floor, where a signal suspected to be from the plane’s black box was detected, come Wednesday. No wreckage has yet been found.

“Bluefin-21 has now completed more than 80 per cent of the focused underwater search area and further missions are planned,” the Perth based Joint Agency Coordination Centre told Reuters in an e-mail.

“The search will continue. We are currently consulting very closely with our international partners on the best way to effect this for the future.”

As the Bluefin embarked on its 10th trip to depths of more than 4.5 km, some 2,000 km northwest of the Australian city of Perth, a tropical cyclone heading south over the Indian Ocean suspended the air search.

“It has been determined that the current weather conditions are resulting in heavy seas and poor visibility, and would make any air search activities ineffective and potentially hazardous,” the JACC said.

The ships involved in the day’s search about 1,600km northwest of the Australian city of Perth would continue with their planned activities, the centre added.

The search coordinator, retired Australian Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, said on April 14 that the air and surface component of the operation would end about a week ago.

But daily sorties have continued unabated in what is shaping to be the most expensive search in aviation history, involving some two dozen nations.

“There will be no change to our mission of one nine-hour flight per day,” US 7th Fleet public affairs officer, Commander William J. Marks, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, a statement attributed to the families of passengers on board the missing flight accused the Malaysian government of giving information about the investigation to the media before them and demanded “regular pre-payments” of compensation before the investigation was complete.

Many family members have been critical of the Malaysian government’s handling of the so far fruitless search.

“We don’t expect that they find all of the plane, or all of the bodies, or even that they know everything about how this surreal situation happened, but we do expect at least a tiny bit of concrete evidence,” said the statement, published on the families’ Facebook page on Tuesday.

Until conclusive proof confirms the plane’s fate, the Malaysian government has “an obligation to make regular pre-payments to the families in need and they have an obligation to exert themselves beyond repeated attempts to force a closure of the issue”.

JINDO, South Korea — The captain and crew of a South Korean ferry that capsized with hundreds of children on board acted in a way “tantamount to murder”, President Park Geun-Hye said Monday, as four more crew members were arrested and the death toll rose to 80.

Park’s denunciation, in which she vowed to hold all those responsible for the disaster “criminally accountable”, followed the release of a transcript showing the panic and indecision that paralysed decision making on the bridge as the ship listed and sank Wednesday morning.

The confirmed death toll jumped to 80 as divers stepped up the recovery of bodies from inside the 6,825-tonne Sewol, but 222 people remained unaccounted for.

“The actions of the captain and some crew members were utterly incomprehensible, unacceptable and tantamount to murder,” Park said in a meeting with senior aides.

“Not only my heart, but the hearts of all South Koreans have been broken and filled with shock and anger,” said Park, who was heckled Thursday when she met relatives of the hundreds of passengers still missing — most of them schoolchildren.

The families have criticised the official response to the disaster, saying the initial rescue effort was inadequate and mismanaged.

The president said it was increasingly clear that Captain Lee Joon-seok had unnecessarily delayed the evacuation of passengers as the ferry started sinking, and then “deserted them” by escaping with most of his crew members.

Ethically ‘unimaginable’ 

“This is utterly unimaginable, legally and ethically,” she said.

Lee was arrested on Saturday along with a helmsman and the ship’s relatively inexperienced third officer, who was in charge of the bridge when the ship first ran into trouble.

Three more officers and an engineer were detained by police on Monday and prosecutors said they could face similar charges of criminal negligence and deserting passengers.

A transcript of the final radio communications between the Sewol and marine traffic control suggested a scene of total confusion as the vessel listed sharply to one side.

In the end, the evacuation order was only given around 40 minutes after the ship ran into trouble, by which time it was listing so heavily that escape was almost impossible.

“Precious minutes just wasted” was the front-page verdict of the Dong-A Ilbo daily on Monday.

Lee has insisted he had acted in the passengers’ best interest, delaying the order to abandon ship because he feared people would be swept away and drowned.

Meanwhile, local TV stations aired excerpts Monday of a 2010 promotional video in which Lee said ferries offered the safest public transport “as long as you follow the instruction of our crew”.

Realistic hopes of finding survivors have disappeared, but families of the missing still oppose the use of heavy cranes to lift the ship before divers have searched every section.

It took divers more than two days to access the submerged ferry and the first bodies from inside the vessel were only recovered on Sunday.

Officials said divers had rigged up multiple guide lines Monday into a dining hall as well as cabins on the third and fourth levels where many bodies were believed to be trapped.

“This allows multiple rescue workers to enter the ship at the same time to speed up operations,” said Ko Myeong-seok, a spokesman for the government task force handling the disaster.

Survivor trauma

Of the 476 people on board the Sewol, 352 were students from the Danwon High School in Ansan city just south of Seoul, who were on an organised trip to the holiday island of Jeju.

Cha Sang-hoon, the head of the hospital in Ansan where 74 student survivors are being treated, said 20 per cent of them were suffering from serious mental stress and depression.

South Koreans have been stunned by the tragedy, which looks set to become one of the country’s worst peacetime disasters and has unleashed profound national grief.

The families have bitterly criticised the official response to the disaster, saying delays in accessing the submerged ship may have robbed any survivors of their last chance to make it out alive.

In her comments Monday, Park said the government should review its crisis response system.

KUALA LUMPUR — A Malaysia Airlines plane with 166 people aboard made an emergency landing in Kuala Lumpur on Monday in another blow to the flag-carrier’s safety image after the loss of flight MH370.

Flight MH192, bound for the southern Indian city of Bangalore, turned back to Kuala Lumpur shortly after it was discovered that a tyre had burst on take-off, the airline said.

“As safety is of utmost priority to Malaysia Airlines, the aircraft was required to turn back to KLIA (Kuala Lumpur International Airport),” the airline said in a statement.

The plane carrying 159 passengers and seven crew members circled for hours to burn up fuel and minimise risk of fire when landing.

Some passengers cried while others prayed as the plane circled off the Malaysian coast.

The plane landed safely early Monday morning and took off again more than 12 hours later.

Relieved passengers hugged their relatives when they arrived late Monday at the Bangalore airport.

“I just want to forget what happened. Now that we’ve landed safely, I don’t want to think back,” said Tejaswi, a housewife who uses just one name.

Usha Devi, a 75-year-old woman wearing a green saree, broke down in tears as she spoke to reporters at the airport.

“I am really thankful to the almighty that he saved our lives,” Devi said.

A teenager who gave his name as Tambe said it had been tense time aboard the aircraft.

“The crew and the pilot really held their nerve. We were all pretty scared but the pilot assured us that everything would be alright,” he said.

Malaysia Airlines is still reeling from the loss and presumed crash of MH370, which disappeared on March 8 while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.

The plane is now believed to have crashed into the remote Indian Ocean with 239 people aboard after inexplicably diverting from its route.

Landed safely 

In the latest event, the plane landed without incident at Kuala Lumpur at 1:56 am (1756 GMT), nearly four hours after take-off.

Malaysia Airlines said tyre debris discovered on the runway prompted the decision to bring the Boeing 737-800 aircraft back to Kuala Lumpur.

“They have landed safely — thank God,” tweeted Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein after the plane landed in Kuala Lumpur.

Malaysian police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said police would probe the incident.

He said the inquiry would include the possibility of sabotage, though he gave no indication that sabotage was suspected.

“We will take the necessary steps to investigate from all angles,” he told Malaysian media.

Until the disappearance of MH370, Malaysia Airlines had enjoyed a good safety record, as did the Boeing 777 aircraft used for MH370.

An Australian-led multination search effort is now scouring a remote area of the Indian Ocean in a bid to find the jet’s wreckage and recover its flight data recorders to determine what happened.

Malaysia’s government and the airline have come under harsh criticism from Chinese relatives of MH370 passengers — two thirds of its 227 passengers were from China — who have alleged a bungling response and a cover-up.

MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin said Monday he had signed a decree rehabilitating Crimea’s Tatars, native inhabitants of the peninsula who were deported under Stalin over accusations of Nazi collaboration and who fiercely oppose the region’s new Moscow-backed authorities.

“I have signed a decree to rehabilitate the Crimean Tatar population of Crimea, the Armenian population, Germans, Greeks, all those who suffered during Stalin’s purges,” Putin told a government meeting.

Crimea’s 300,000 Tatars, who make up around 12 per cent of the peninsula’s population, largely boycotted a disputed referendum last month in which nearly 97 per cent of voters chose to split from Ukraine and join Russia.

The decree calls for “historical justice [and] a political, social and spiritual revival” for the Crimean Tatars and other groups deported under Stalin.

It is seen as an overture but will likely fail to satisfy Tatars, who eye the Kremlin with distrust and have recently said they will consider holding a plebescite on broader autonomy.

The chairman of the Tatars’ assembly, the Mejlis, declined immediate comment but one of his deputies expressed scepticism that the decree would lead to any real changes for the long-suffering people.

“We’ve been waiting for this decree,” Nariman Jelial told AFP. “But it would be a fantasy to say that the Mejlis and the Crimean Tatars as a whole have welcomed it with joy and enthusiasm.”

He dismissed the decree as a “standard set of wishes and directives which were repeatedly voiced by the Ukrainian authorities” who ruled the peninsula before Russia annexed it.

“There is another problem,” he added. “The people who have stood in the way of all the good Ukrainian initiatives towards the Crimean Tatars remain in power in Crimea.”

Ukrainian flag taken down 

In a sign of the continuing tensions in Crimea, a group of 30 men in fatigues took down a Ukrainian flag from the Mejlis building in Simferopol, the peninsula’s main city, on Monday.

The men, believed to be members of the peninsula’s self-defence units, replaced it with Crimea’s regional flag despite the protests of three women in the building at the time.

Mejlis spokeswoman Lilia Muslimova, who was at the building, said the men insulted them and threatened them with arrest.

Following the March 16 secession referendum, the Mejlis had taken down the Ukrainian flag so as not to provoke confrontation with the new local authorities.

But it had recently re-hoisted the flag at the request of the spiritual leader of the Crimean Tatars, Mustafa Dzhemilev, who is also a Ukrainian lawmaker and is currently in Simferopol.

After the men in camouflage left, one of the women replaced the Crimean flag with the national banner of the Crimean Tatars.

Under Stalin, the Crimean Tatars, a Turkic-speaking Muslim group, were accused of collaborating with Nazi Germany and deported to Central Asia in 1944.

Nearly half of them died of starvation and disease.

They began returning to Crimea under the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and were granted Ukrainian citizenship after Kiev won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

At a closed-door session of the UN Security Council last month, Dzhemilev said his people were extremely worried for the future and that some 5,000 Tatars had already fled the peninsula.

Many Tatars have said the sight of armed Russian soldiers and armoured personnel carriers stirred painful memories among the older generation and some expressed fears they could again be deported.

DONETSK, Ukraine — Russia was under US pressure Saturday to convince pro-Moscow rebels in Ukraine to cease occupying eastern towns, after Washington warned the situation in the former Soviet republic was in a “pivotal period”.

But with the separatists’ refusal to budge throwing a deal to defuse the crisis into doubt, and US sanctions looming large, Russia warned that its military was massed on Ukraine’s border, ready to act.

In the nearly dozen Ukrainian towns the pro-Kremlin rebels were holding, the stalemate dragged on Saturday.

In the major eastern city of Donetsk, gunmen remained barricaded inside the regional government building.

“We are going on as usual,” one of the rebels told AFP. “An Orthodox priest is inside with us and we are going to celebrate Easter tonight.”

The failure to implement the agreement hammered out in Geneva on Thursday by the US, Russia, Ukraine and the EU threatened to deepen the worst East-West crisis since the Cold War.

US Secretary of State John Kerry told Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov overnight that “full and immediate compliance” was needed of the pact, which calls for the disarmament of “illegal armed groups” and the end to the occupation of seized buildings.

Kerry “made clear that the next few days would be a pivotal period for all sides to implement the statement’s provisions”, a senior State Department official said.

US looking to Russia
for progress 

US President Barack Obama has said he wants to see progress within days, otherwise more sanctions would be imposed, on top of those already targeting the inner circle of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The United States, NATO and many EU countries see Putin as the puppet master behind the Ukraine insurgency. They accuse him of sending in elite Russian soldiers to stir unrest and ensure the country — parts of which are historically and linguistically tied to Russia — stays in Moscow’s orbit.

US National Security Adviser Susan Rice said on Friday that the White House was watching to see whether Russia uses “its very considerable influence to restrain and withdraw those irregular militia from the buildings and spaces that they’ve occupied”.

Putin denies his forces have any role in east Ukraine. On Thursday, however, he dropped an identical denial over Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine last month, to finally admit the Russian army had in fact been deployed there.

The Russian leader said in a television interview to be broadcast later Saturday that the soldiers sent to Crimea would soon receive medals.

He also said he believed relations with the West could be normalised — but that “does not only depend on us. It depends on our partners”.

In a sign of the current prickly relationship with the West, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday the US threats of more sanctions on Moscow were “absolutely unacceptable”.

“One cannot treat Russia like it is a shameful student,” he said.

The West and Ukraine also had responsibility to make sure the Geneva deal worked, he said.

He also stressed that Russian troops were deployed “close to the Ukrainian border” — many of them sent there “due to the situation in Ukraine”.

NATO believes Russia has around 40,000 troops positioned on its border with Ukraine, in a state of readiness for an invasion.

Putin has said that he retained the right to send his army into Ukraine in order to protect Russian speakers there. On Friday, he repeated the assertion, though he said that he “very much hoped” he would not have to do so.

US vice president to visit 

Although the United States has not given a deadline for compliance with the Geneva deal, US Vice President Joe Biden is due to visit Kiev on Tuesday.

He will be meeting leaders who have taken charge since the February ouster of pro-Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych, after months of street protests that turned increasingly deadly.

Russia refuses to see the new Kiev government as legitimate, and the turmoil in Ukraine’s southeast could prove an obstacle to a planned May 25 presidential election.

The separatist leaders in the self-declared Donetsk Republic say they will not vacate public sites until the “illegal” government exits state buildings in Kiev.

But Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister who is a leading candidate for next month’s presidential election, said she held talks with the Donetsk separatists on Friday that left her convinced that “compromise is possible”.

In concessions to the Russian-speaking militants, Ukraine’s interim president and prime minister have vowed to protect the Russian language, decentralise power and hold off further military action against the separatists until at least Tuesday.

Ukraine’s military has so far proven woefully inept in its efforts to dislodge the separatists. On Friday, in a rare success, the army said it had recovered two of six armoured vehicles captured by rebels during a disastrous military operation earlier in the week.

Yet a poll published Saturday suggested the majority of inhabitants in Ukraine’s restive east, while suspicious of Kiev’s authorities, had no desire to be subsumed into the Russian Federation.

The Russian-language Weekly Mirror newspaper said 52.2 per cent of the 3,200 respondants to the survey by Kiev’s Institute for International Sociology were against coming under Russian rule while 27.5 per cent were in favour.

In a gesture of national unity, despite the political differences, around 50 Kiev residents on Saturday sent Easter cakes to people in Ukraine’s east along with greeting cards.

“I wrote that we Ukrainians are a united people, we should live in a united country, we should not be divided,” one of them, 12-year-old Maxym, told AFP.