World

KIEV — Ukraine warned Sunday it was on the brink of disaster and called up military reservists after Russia’s threat to invade its Western-leaning neighbour risked sparking the worst crisis since the Cold War.

US President Barack Obama and his Western allies took turns admonishing Russia as Ukraine looked on the brink of losing control of Crimea with the defection of its navy commander to pro-Kremlin forces who have tightened their grip on the Black Sea peninsula.

World leaders huddled for urgent consultations across global capitals after Russia’s parliament voted Saturday to allow President Vladimir Putin to send troops into the ex-Soviet state — a decision Obama branded a “violation of Ukrainian sovereignty”.

US Secretary of State John Kerry upped the stakes for Putin by bluntly warning that Moscow risked relinquishing its coveted place among the Group of Eight (G-8) nations if its sabre rattling did not halt.

Ukraine’s new Western-backed Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk — in power for just a week following the overthrow of a pro-Russian regime — also warned that any invasion “would mean war and the end of all relations between the two countries”.

“We are on the brink of a disaster,” Yatsenyuk told the nation of 46 million in a televised address.

Pro-Moscow gunmen who are widely believed to be acting under Kremlin orders intensified their control Sunday over large swathes of a strategic peninsula that has housed Russian navies since the 18th century.

Witnesses said Russian soldiers had moved out of their bases and blocked about 400 Ukrainian marines in the eastern port city of Feodosiya. AFP reporters saw a similar presence of troops outside a Ukrainian military installation near the Crimean capital Simferopol and other locations.

But the biggest blow to the new Kiev leaders came when Ukrainian Navy Commander Denis Berezovsky announced a day after his appointment that he was switching allegiance to the pro-Russian authorities in Crimea after gunmen surrounded his building and cut off its electricity.

Crimea’s pro-Kremlin government chief Sergiy Aksyonov — installed in power Thursday after an armed raid on the region’s government building and not recognised by Kiev — immediately named Berezovsky as head of the peninsula’s own independent navy.

Full combat alert 

Fears of Russia’s first invasion of a neighbour since a brief 2008 confrontation with Georgia prompted the largely untested interim team in Kiev to put its military on full combat alert and announce the call-up of all reservists.

The vast country on the eastern edge of Europe would face a David-and-Goliath struggle should the conflict escalate. Russia’s army of 845,000 soldiers could easily overwhelm Ukraine’s force of 130,000 — half of them conscripts.

Putin said it was his duty to protect ethnic Russians in Crimea and southeastern swathes of Ukraine that have ancient ties to Moscow and look on Kiev’s new pro-EU leaders with disdain.

Russian officials also argued they had no need to ask the UN Security Council for permission — as Putin had demanded for any Western action in Syria — because the well-being of their own citizens was at stake.

NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen told Russia during urgent talks in Brussels that its movement of troops “threatens peace and security in Europe”.

German Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke ominously of preventing “a new division of Europe” while France and Britain called for negotiations between Moscow and Kiev — either directly or through the United Nations.

The most immediate response to Russia’s actions came when Washington and its Western allies pulled out of this week’s preparatory meetings for the June G-8 summit in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi.

Kerry went one step further, warning Putin that “he is not going have a Sochi G-8, he may not even remain in the G-8 if this continues.”

Sochi hosted last month’s $51-billion Winter Olympic Games extravaganza that along with the football World Cup in 2018 are meant to highlight Russia’s return to prosperity and global influence under Putin’s rule.

Russia was admitted to the G-8 in 1998 in recognition of the late president Boris Yeltsin’s democratic reforms — a spot the Kremlin views as recognition of its post-Soviet might.

‘Candid’ Obama-Putin exchange 

Events have moved rapidly since a three-month crisis in culturally splintered Ukraine — long fought over by Moscow and the West — sparked by pro-Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to spurn a historic pact with the European Union in favour of closer ties with Russia.

It culminated in a week of carnage last month that claimed nearly 100 lives and led to Yanukovych’s ouster.

The Kremlin appeared stunned by the loss of its ally and Kiev’s subsequent vow to seek EU membership — a decision that would shatter Putin’s dream of reassembling a powerful economic and military post-Soviet bloc.

The White House said Obama told Putin in a “candid and direct” exchange his actions in Crimea were a “breach of international law”.

The Kremlin’s account of Putin’s conversation with Obama was equally blunt.

It said Putin flatly told the US leader that Russia “reserves the right to protect its interests and those of the Russian-speaking population” if violence in Ukraine spread.

The Kremlin said Putin had also told German Chancellor Angela Merkel late Sunday that Russia’s response to the “relentless threat of acts of violence from ultranationalist forces... [was] fully adequate”.

Analysts called Ukraine the most serious crisis to test the West’s relations with Moscow since the 1991 breakup of the USSR.

“The damage to Russia’s relations with the West will be deep and lasting, far worse than after the Russian-Georgian war,” Eugene Rumer and Andrew Weiss of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote in a report.

“Think 1968, not 2008,” they said in reference to the Soviet Union’s decision to send tanks into Prague to suppress a pro-democracy uprising.

Pro-Kremlin sentiments in Crimea remained in evidence Sunday amid a sea of Russian flags.

“Crimea is Russia,” one elderly lady told AFP in front of a statue of Soviet founder Lenin that dominates a square next to the occupied parliament building in the regional capital Simferopol.

 ‘We will not surrender’ 

The mood in Kiev was radically different as about 50,000 people massed on Independence Square — the crucible of both the latest wave of demonstrations and the 2004 Orange Revolution that first nudged Kiev on a westward path — in protest at Putin’s latest threat.

“We will not surrender,” the huge crowd chanted under grey skies.

Ukraine’s prime minister had assured the nation Saturday he was “convinced” Russia would not launch an offensive because Moscow realised it would put an end to relations between two neighbours with centuries of shared history.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also said Saturday that “for the moment, this decision (to invade) has not been taken.”

KUNMING, China — China Sunday promised tough punishment for knife-wielding attackers who killed 29 people in an unprecedented train station rampage, blaming separatists from Xinjiang, as witnesses described a city in shock.

Victims spoke of black-clad attackers slashing indiscriminately as people queued to buy tickets late Saturday at Kunming station, in an incident that lasted about half an hour.

More than 130 were wounded in the attack in the city in the southwestern province of Yunnan, prompting shock and outrage nationwide. Buses and taxis ferried people to hospital.

A shop worker told AFP some of the victims took refuge in her store.

“Many were crying and some looked like they had been cut. We were terrified. Everyone in Kunming is still in shock,” she said.

Police shot dead at least four attackers, arrested one and were hunting for more, said the official Xinhua news agency, which in a commentary called the incident “China’s 9/11” and a “severe crime against the humanity”.

China’s security chief Meng Jianzhu, who rushed to Kunming to oversee the operation, promised “all-out efforts” to “severely punish terrorists according to the law”, Xinhua said.

He “urged forcible measures to crack down on violent terrorism activities”, it added.

The Kunming city government said the attack was orchestrated by separatists from the northwest region of Xinjiang, Xinhua reported.

Xinjiang, a vast area home to the mostly-Muslim Uighur minority, is periodically hit by violent clashes between locals and security forces but attacks targeting civilians are rarer.

Attacks are almost unheard of in Yunnan, more than 1,600 kilometres from Xinjiang and a popular tourist destination.

The attack comes months after three members of the same Xinjiang family crashed their car into crowds of tourists in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the symbolic heart of the Chinese state, killing two people. They then set the vehicle on fire, killing themselves, according to authorities.

It also came days before delegates from across the communist-ruled country gather in Beijing for the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress, the rubber-stamp parliament.

Major Chinese train stations have security and identity checkpoints on entry.

Barry Sautman, an expert on ethnic politics in China at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said the attack had “high symbolic value”.

“It shows that the organisation that carried it out is able to strike anywhere,” he told AFP.

‘Stabbing whoever 

they saw’ 

Victim Yang Haifei, who was wounded in the chest and back, told Xinhua he had been buying a ticket when the attackers approached.

“I saw a person come straight at me with a long knife and I ran away with everyone,” he said, while others “simply fell on the ground”.

Some who escaped were desperately searching for missing loved ones.

“I can’t find my husband, and his phone went unanswered,” Yang Ziqing was quoted as saying.

She had been waiting for her train to Shanghai when a knife-wielding man suddenly came at them, she said.

The attackers were dressed in similar black clothing, the semiofficial China News Service said, citing witnesses.

“A group of men carrying weapons burst into the train station plaza and the ticket hall, stabbing whoever they saw,” it said.

Photos posted on Sina Weibo — a Chinese version of Twitter — showed blood spattered across the station floor and medical staff crouching over bodies lying on the ground, although the images’ authenticity could not be verified.

Pictures on news portal 163.com also showed what it claimed was one of the attackers, lying on a stretcher surrounded by police.

Other online images showed spectacles, shoes and baggage strewn across the floor of the waiting room, behind police tape.

None of the victims were foreigners, Xinhua quoted officials as saying.

President Xi Jinping called for “all-out efforts” in the investigation and for the attackers to be punished “in accordance with the law”, the agency said.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon condemned “in the strongest terms” the “terrible attack on civilians”, his spokesman said in a statement, adding he “hopes that those responsible will be brought to justice”.

‘They will go to hell’ 

Many Weibo users expressed outrage. “Targeting ordinary people in a terrorist attack is disgraceful,” said one. “They have nothing to do with this issue.”

Li Chengpeng, a social commentator and government critic who has more than seven million followers, said: “No matter who did this, for what purpose, and no matter which race, to target innocent people at a train station is an evil choice. Their hearts will be punished and they will go to hell.”

Xinhua said in a commentary that the attack had shrouded “the whole nation in terror”.

“Mothers, sons and daughters were slaughtered by strangers,” it said. “Nothing justifies such a carnage against innocent civilians. A nationwide outrage has been stirred.”

Beijing maintains that unrest in Xinjiang is caused by terrorist groups seeking independence, including the overseas-based East Turkestan Islamic Movement.

But its strength and links to global terrorism are murky, and some experts say China exaggerates the threat to justify tough security measures in Xinjiang, where rights groups complain of widespread religious repression and economic discrimination.

In an e-mailed statement, Dilshat Raxit of the exiled World Uyghur Congress said there was “no justification for attacks on civilians” but added that discriminatory and repressive policies provoked “extreme measures” in response.

MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin won the green light from parliament Saturday to send troops into Ukraine after a bloody three-month uprising that swept new pro-EU leaders to power but sparked unrest in the pro-Kremlin Crimean peninsula.

The stark escalation to what threatens to blow up into the worst crisis in relations between Moscow and the West since the Cold War came as Kalashnikov-wielding militia hoisted the Russia flag over Crimean government buildings and seized control of the peninsula’s airports.

Putin’s shock decision to seek the upper house of parliament’s authorisation to use force in the ex-Soviet country of 46 million came less than a day after US President Barack Obama warned that any such action would carry “costs” for Moscow.

Putin had remained silent since Ukraine’s parliament on
February 22 ousted pro-Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych — who has since fled to Russia — after a week of carnage in Kiev that claimed nearly 100 lives.

The ex-Soviet country’s bloodiest crisis since its 1991 independence erupted in November, when Yanukovych rejected an historic deal that would have opened Ukraine’s door to eventual EU membership in favour of tighter ties with old master Moscow.

On Saturday the Kremlin said Putin had asked the upper house to authorise force “in connection with the extraordinary situation in Ukraine and the threat to the lives of Russian citizens”.

“I submit to the Federation Council a request to use the armed forces of the Russian Federation on Ukrainian territory until the normalisation of the political situation in that country,” the Kremlin quoted Putin as saying.

Putin said Russia also had to protect servicemen from the Black Sea Fleet that is based in Crimea’s port town of Sevastopol “fully in line with an international accord”.

The Federation Council unanimously approved Putin’s request after a lightning-fast debate.

Upper chamber chair Valentina Matviyenko also ordered the council’s foreign affairs committee to ask Putin to recall the Russian ambassador from the United States.

Matviyenko suggested sending in a “limited contingent” — a phrase that mimicked the language used for the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

There was no immediate indication about the number of troops involved. A senior senator said that would be up to Putin.

Ukraine’s Defence Minister Igor Tenyukh had earlier told the new Cabinet’s first session that Russia had sent 30 armoured personnel carriers and 6,000 additional troops into Crimea to help local pro-Kremlin militia gain broader independence from the new pro-EU leaders in Kiev.

He accused Russia of acting “without warning or Ukraine’s permission”.

Crimea appeal for help 

Putin’s move came after an appeal for help from Crimea’s newly chosen premier, Sergiy Aksyonov — a ruler not recognised by Kiev and appointed by regional lawmakers after gunmen had seized the parliament building in the regional capital Simferopol on Thursday.

“I ask Russian President Vladimir Putin to help in ensuring peace and calm on the territory of Crimea,” Aksyonov said in an address broadcast in full by Russian state television.

Ukrainian boxer turned politician Vitali Klitschko responded to the Russian move by calling on parliament to ask interim President Oleksandr Turchynov to declare a “national mobilisation after the start of Russian aggression against Ukraine”.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague, who heads to Kiev on Sunday, said he had summoned the Russian ambassador to register his concerns over Moscow’s decision.

“This action is a potentially grave threat to the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine. We condemn any act of aggression against Ukraine,” Hague said.

But one top Russian foreign ministry official indicated Putin may pause before sending troops into Ukraine.

“The agreement that the president received... does not mean that this right will be realised quickly,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the same agency that “for the moment, this decision has not been taken”.

Obama warning 

Obama warned Putin Friday that “there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine”.

A senior US official separately told AFP that Obama and some key European leaders could skip June’s G-8 summit in Sochi if Moscow’s forces became more directly involved in Ukraine.

Putin’s request for force authorisation came after a flurry of diplomatic efforts to resolve what threatens to become the most dire crisis to hit Moscow’s relations with the West since the Cold War.

Britain’s Hague said he had urged a “de-escalation in Crimea” in a telephone conversation with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, while Germany and France also voiced concern.

Kiev’s new leaders have grappled with the dual threats of economic collapse and secession by regions that had backed Yanukovych.

The threat of a debt default that Kiev leaders warn could come as early as next week increased further when Russia’s state-owned Gazprom — often accused of being wielded as a weapon by the Kremlin against uncooperative ex-Soviet states — warned that it may be forced to hike the price it charges Ukraine for natural gas.

“The debt is $1.549 billion, it is huge,” Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov told the RIA Novosti news agency.

“Clearly, with this debt Ukraine may not be able to keep its discount [to market price] for the gas.”

Ukraine won a one-third discount from Gazprom under a deal signed by Yanukovych with Putin that also saw Russia promise to buy $15 billion of government debt.

Ukraine’s new leaders have said that the country needs $35 billion over the coming two years to keep the economy afloat.

BEIJING — At least 28 people were killed in a “violent terrorist attack” at a train station in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming by a group of unidentified people brandishing knives, five of whom were shot dead, state media said on Sunday.

Another 162 people were injured, the official Xinhua news agency added. It said the attack had taken place late on Saturday evening.

“It was an organised, premeditated violent terrorist attack,” Xinhua said.

Police shot dead five of the attackers and were searching for around five others, it added.

Kunming resident Yang Haifei told Xinhua that he was buying a ticket when he saw a group of people, mostly wearing black, rush into the station and start attacking bystanders.

“I saw a person come straight at me with a long knife and I ran away with everyone,” he said. Those who were slower were caught by the attackers. “They just fell on the ground.”

Graphic pictures on the Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo showed bodies covered in blood lying on the ground at the station.

There was no immediate word on who was responsible.

State television’s microblog said domestic security chief Meng Jianzhu was on his way to the scene.

Weibo users took to the service to describe details of what happened, though many of those posts were quickly deleted by government censors, especially those that described the attackers, two of whom were identified by some as women.

Others condemned the attack.

“No matter who, for whatever reason, or of what race, chose somewhere so crowded as a train station, and made innocent people their target — they are evil and they should go to hell,” wrote one user.

The attack comes at a particularly sensitive time as China gears up for the annual meeting of parliament, which opens in Beijing on Wednesday and is normally accompanied by a tightening of security across the country.

China has blamed similar incidents in the past on Islamist extremists operating in the restive far western region of Xinjiang, though such attacks have generally been limited to Xinjiang itself.

China says its first major suicide attack, in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in October, involved militants from Xinjiang, home to the Muslim Uighur people, many of whom chafe at Chinese restrictions on their culture and religion.

Hu Xijin, editor of the influential Global Times newspaper, published by the ruling Communist Party’s official People’s Daily, wrote on his Weibo feed that the government should say who it suspected of the attack as soon as possible.

“If it was Xinjiang separatists, it needs to be announced promptly, as hearsay should not be allowed to fill the vacuum,” Hu wrote.

ANKARA — Turkey’s parliament has passed a bill to close down thousands of private schools, many of which are run by an influential Muslim cleric embroiled in a bitter feud with the government.

The move is the latest blow struck in a rivalry between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his former ally Fethullah Gulen which has seen the Turkish government entangled in a graft scandal and shaken to its core.

In a late-night session on Friday, lawmakers in the 550-seat house voted 226 for and 22 against the bill which sets September 1, 2015 as the deadline to shut down the network of schools.

Around 4,000 private schools in Turkey are run by Gulen, and provide a major source of income for his Hizmet (Service) movement, which describes itself as a global, social and cultural movement inspired by Islamic ideals.

Tensions have long simmered between Erdogan and Gulen, who once worked hand-in-hand as the conservative pro-business middle class rose at the expense of the military and former secular elite.

But they reached breaking point in November when government first floated the idea of shutting down the schools, which aim to help students prepare for high school and university.

Erdogan said at the time he wanted to abolish an “illegal” and unfair education system which he charged turned children into “competition horses”.

“Those who benefit from these courses are the kids of rich families in big cities,” said the Turkish premier, who himself hails from humble roots and has tried to burnish an image as a man of the people during his term in office.

Corruption crisis

In mid-December dozens of Erdogan’s allies were detained in police raids on allegations of bribery in construction projects, gold smuggling and illicit dealings with Iran.

Erdogan accused so-called Gulenists implanted in Turkey’s police and judiciary of instigating the corruption probe in a bid to undermine his government ahead of local elections in March and presidential elections in August.

He retaliated by sacking hundreds of police and prosecutors believed to be linked to the movement run by Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in the United States.

A Turkish court on Friday released the last five suspects detained in the corruption probe, including the sons of two former ministers.

However the corruption crisis, which dragged down four ministers and prompted a Cabinet shake-up, has posed the most serious challenge to Erdogan’s Islamic-rooted government since it came to power in 2002.

The controversy has widened to implicate Erdogan himself, after recordings were leaked online last week in which the premier can allegedly be heard discussing hiding large sums of cash and conspiring to extort a bribe from a business associate.

The government has said the phone recordings are “fabricated”.

Government has also accused Gulenists of wiretapping thousands of influential people — including the prime minister, the spy chief and journalists.

At an election rally on Saturday, Erdogan blamed Gulen loyalists for “espionage” and “blackmail” and threatened that they would pay a “heavy price”.

“Confidential and strategic conversations are being wiretapped,” he said.

Observers say the schools law is the latest move by the government to strike back at Gulen’s Hizmet network.

Hizmet risks losing millions of dollars in revenue once the Turkish establishments, which offer education to supplement normal schooling, are closed down.

Erdogan’s government has also recently pushed through legislation tightening state control over the Internet and the judiciary, generating criticism at home and abroad and raising questions about the state of democracy in Turkey.

Gulen, who has been living in the United States since 1999 to escape charges of plotting against the secular state by the then-government, has denied any involvement in the corruption probe.

The Hizmet movement also runs some 500 private schools around the world.

MOSCOW – Russia's upper house, the Federation Council, on Saturday began debating a request from President Vladimir Putin to use Russian armed forces on the territory of Ukraine.

The extraordinary session began with a speech by Putin's envoy Grigory Karasin on the need to approve the request, which was also backed by the heads of the Federation Council's defence and foreign affairs committees.

Unlike most legislation in Russia, the use of armed forces abroad only requires the approval of the rubber-stamp Federation Council without any need for a preliminary okay from the State Duma lower house.

CARACAS — Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro opened a national peace conference Wednesday after three weeks of sometimes deadly street protests, but most of the opposition stayed away, with one leader calling it a photo op.

Duelling demos of pro- and anti-government protesters took to the streets in a sign of the deep polarisation of this oil-rich but economically and social troubled country, where three weeks of demonstrations have left 14 people dead.

As he opened the conference, Maduro said: “We cannot just sit by and wait for events to escalate.”

The conference held at the presidential palace was attended by religious and business groups, intellectuals and governors mainly from the pro-government Chavismo movement named after the late populist leader Hugo Chavez.

Some opposition figures did show up. But the main umbrella opposition grouping known as MUD stayed away.

Maduro got an earful from the head of the business federation Fedecamaras, Jorge Roig.

“Mr President, our country is not well. We Venezuelans are killing each other and that is not acceptable. As head of state you are the one mainly responsible for calming things down,” Roig told the gathering.

The opposition’s main leader Henrique Capriles did not attend, dismissing the talks as a government photo op.

Venezuela has been swept by student-led protests since February 4, posing the greatest challenge yet to Maduro’s 11-month-old government.

Those who are on the streets say public anger over shortages of food and other basics, soaring inflation and rampant crime have served as kindling for these protests.

“Unless we all get out there and protest, we are not going to be able to get out of this really complicated situation,” said university student Andres Contreras, out on a Caracas street.

Venezuelan authorities said Wednesday they had arrested five intelligence agents for suspected ties to killings during protests against Maduro’s government.

On Monday, nine people were arrested in the same case including three SEBIN intelligence service members, and the rest police.

“Why should we have to live like this?” demanded demonstrator Adriana Diaz, a 48-year-old lawyer banging on a cooking pot, one of the symbols of opposition defiance.

“The government should listen to people, and hang the economic system.”

Maduro has responded to the street protests with force, arresting scores of demonstrators as well as a prominent opposition leader, Leopoldo Lopez.

Caracas was relatively peaceful Wednesday after a night of occasional clashes in the capital.

But the opposition and the government staged separate marches, in a vivid display of the polarisation roiling a country with the world’s largest oil reserves.

Several thousand women dressed in white marched through the city to a military barracks to demand “an end to the repression and violence by the security bodies”.

“We know that it’s the Cubans, an invading army, who are giving the orders,” said a document the women brough to the barracks. “Don’t let them.” Communist Cuba is Venezuela’s main political ally.

Lopez’s wife, Lilian Tintori, led the march with opposition deputy Maria Corina Machado.

Meanwhile, thousands of government supporters marched towards the presidential palace to rally for “peace” and against what Maduro insists is an opposition “coup d’etat”.

Maduro has sought to deepen the socialist, anti-American policies of his charismatic predecessor and mentor, the late Chavez.

The United States voiced some optimism.

“We’re prepared to have a change in this relationship, this tension between our countries has gone on for too long in our view,” US Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday.

“But we are not going to sit around and be blamed for things we have never done,” he added.

On Tuesday, the United States announced it would expel three Venezuelan diplomats, a tit-for-tat response to the expulsion of three Americans by Caracas last week.

The US action came the same day that Maduro’s government named a new ambassador to Washington.

The two countries have not exchanged ambassadors since 2010, reflecting the bad blood that has prevailed between the two trade partners since Chavez came to power in 1999.

ANKARA — Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday accused a US-based cleric of conspiring against him with the opposition by faking recordings and dared him to “stand up in the squares” and do his politics in Turkey.

An audio track purporting to be of Erdogan giving his son business advice was posted anonymously on YouTube on Wednesday, following one earlier in the week that fuelled a simmering government corruption scandal and unnerved markets.

Addressing his first campaign rally for March’s local elections since the recordings appeared, a combative Erdogan said Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen had collaborated with the secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP) to spread the fabricated “montage”.

“Hodja (scholar), if you have not done anything wrong, then don’t live in Pennsylvania. If your country is Turkey, then come back to your country,” Erdogan told thousands of supporters in the southern town of Burdur, using Gulen’s honorific title.

“If you want to go into politics, then stand up in the squares and do politics,” he said to cheers, throwing down the gauntlet to a cleric widely held to have considerable sway over parts of the state bureaucracy but less influence at the ballot box.

Gulen, whose followers say they number in the millions, is believed to have built up influence in the police and judiciary over decades, and leads a powerful worldwide Islamic movement from a forested compound in Pennsylvania’s Pocono mountains.

Erdogan’s supporters accuse the cleric of orchestrating the corruption investigation, which erupted in mid-December with the arrest of businessmen close to him and of three ministers’ sons, in a bid to unseat him.

Opinion polls taken before Monday’s posting showed Erdogan’s popularity little affected by the corruption scandal. Political analysts suggest followers of Gulen’s Hizmet (Service) movement account for around 3-5 per cent of voters.

Through his lawyer, Gulen has described the accusation of complicity in the tapes as unjust and contributing to an atmosphere of “hatred and enmity” in Turkish society.

Erdogan’s rift with a man who long supported the rise of his Islamist-rooted AK Party has grown into one of the greatest challenges of his 11 years in power. CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu played the first recording during his weekly group meeting at parliament on Tuesday.

“CHP’s Hodja from overseas has handed a montage to the general manager of CHP and assigned this mission to him,” Erdogan said. “He told him... we will prepare montages from here and you will talk about our montages in your group meetings.”

Erdogan has said the recording posted on Monday, in which he allegedly tells his son Bilal to dispose of large sums of cash as the corruption detentions begin, was faked by his political enemies.

The audio track posted on Wednesday under the pseudonym “Haramzadeler” purported to be of Erdogan advising Bilal to hold out for a better offer in an unspecified business deal.

“The others are bringing. Why can’t he bring? What do they think this business is?... But don’t worry, they will fall into our lap,” says the voice on the recording.

Reuters could not verify the authenticity of either recording and one of Erdogan’s four deputy prime ministers told reporters that Wednesday’s recordings were also fabricated.

“On yesterday’s developments, almost everyone agrees that they are a montage,” Emrullah Isler said at a ceremony in Sudan, describing those responsible as an “illegitimate gang”.

“A sort of political engineering is planned in Turkey through blackmail and tapes,” he said.

Government officials say the Hizmet network has been illegally tapping thousands of telephones in Turkey for years to concoct criminal cases against its enemies and try to influence government affairs.

“Can you imagine this? The police officer who works for me... places a bug in the most private part of my office,” Erdogan said, adding that the officer in question had been identified and legal proceedings started.

SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine — Ukraine’s ousted pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovych emerged defiant Thursday from five days in hiding as the country’s new leaders issued a blunt warning to Russia against any aggression on the volatile Crimean peninsula.

Anxious Western governments voiced fears about the “dangerous” situation in Crimea after dozens of pro-Kremlin gunmen in combat fatigues seized government buildings in the autonomous republic and pleaded with Moscow not to escalate tensions.

Yanukovych is to hold a press conference in Russia on Friday in his first public appearance since fleeing Ukraine at the weekend, Russian news agencies reported.

Russian President Vladimir Putin had stoked concerns Wednesday that Moscow might use its military might to sway the outcome of Ukraine’s three-month stand-off by ordering snap combat readiness drills near the border with the ex-Soviet state.

Interim president Oleksandr Turchynov responded by telling parliament that any movement of Russian troops out of their Black Sea bases in Crimea “will be considered as military aggression”.

Ukraine’s bloodiest crisis since its 1991 independence erupted in November when Yanukovych made the shock decision to ditch a historic EU trade pact in favour of closer ties with old master Russia.

Yanukovych, deposed at the weekend in a fast-moving drama after a week of bloodshed, broke his five-day silence by telling Russian news agencies from an undisclosed location he still viewed himself as president.

A high-ranking source quoted by the news agencies said the fugitive leader’s request for personal security had been “granted on Russian territory”, suggesting he was now there.

Ukraine had appeared to take a decisive swing back towards the EU by ousting Yanukovych and replacing his entire pro-Russian team with a new brand of younger politicians who will steer the nation — torn between a Russified east and pro-European west — until snap presidential polls are held on May 25.

The Verkhovna Rada parliament confirmed opposition icon Yulia Tymoshenko’s top ally Arseniy Yatsenyuk as prime minister by a near-unanimous margin and approved the makeup of his untested but strongly pro-Western government.

“Ukraine is being torn apart,” a sombre Yatsenyuk said of the strategic but now splintered nation that has served as the geopolitical bridge between Russia and the West.

“But Ukraine sees its future in Europe. We will be a part of the European Union.”

The Russian tricolour was flying over the Crimean parliament and government buildings in the regional capital Simferopol as supporters of Moscow rule flocked in from across the scenic peninsula by car and bus.

The autonomous region’s prime minister Anatoliy Mohilyov told AFP up to 50 men with weapons had seized the buildings and were preventing government workers going inside.

But his predecessor Sergiy Kunitsyn told lawmakers in Kiev that his contacts in Crimea said the raid involved “about 120 well-trained gunmen armed with sniper rifles... and carrying enough ammunition to last them a month”.

The gunmen opened the doors to allow in lawmakers who quickly approved the staging of a regional referendum — also on May 25 — that would grant Crimea even greater independence from Kiev.

The referendum proposes granting Crimea “national sovereignty within Ukraine on the basis of existing treaties and agreements”.

Lawmakers — who were later escorted out by the besieging gunmen — also agreed to disband the region’s government and hand its powers to the heavily pro-Russian parliament.

The international response to the stand-off was swift and overwhelmingly critical of Russia.

US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel said at a NATO meeting that Moscow must be transparent about its military exercises.

“I urge them not to take steps that could be misinterpreted or lead to miscalculation,” he said in comments echoed by NATO head Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski — a strong proponent of Ukraine’s eventual EU membership — warned of “a very dangerous game” in Crimea.

And British Prime Minister David Cameron insisted that Russia respects the “sovereignty of Ukraine”.

Moscow responded by saying it was “strictly adhering” to existing treaties with Ukraine on the Black Sea fleet.

Yanukovych — wanted for “mass murder” over the deadly protests — had been widely believed to have gone into hiding in Crimea with his two sons and a small team of heavily armed guards.

But Russian television reported late Wednesday the 63-year-old was hiding in a government health resort near Moscow after fleeing his luxurious estate outside Kiev by helicopter.

Yanukovych’s statement Thursday did not disclose his whereabouts but it said he was “compelled to ask the Russian Federation to ensure my personal security from the actions of extremists”.

But a security source strongly implied he was already in Russia as Moscow had granted his request to ensure his personal security “on Russian territory”.

Moscow’s Interfax news agency quoted a source in Yanukovych’s entourage as saying he would give a press conference in the southwestern city of Rostov-on-Don on Friday at 1300 GMT.

Ukraine’s new leaders meanwhile are suffering from Moscow’s decision to freeze a $15-billion bailout package Putin promised to Yanukovych.

Kiev has requested as much as $35 billion in Western help and owes $13 billion in state debt payments this year — a massive sum in a country where state reserves have shrunk to less than $18 billion.

Concerns over what would be a catastrophic default saw the local currency plunge almost 10 per cent to a record low against the dollar Thursday.

The leadership in Kiev won some reprieve when US Secretary of State John Kerry promised quick delivery of $1 billion in loan guarantees “with some other pieces” to follow.

Kerry said the EU was looking at loan guarantees worth some $1.5 billion for the nation of 46 million people.

Any aid would probably be funnelled through a mechanism overseen by the International Monetary Fund which had frozen its assistance programme because of Yanukovych’s refusal to make painful structural changes.

IMF chief Christine Lagarde promised Thursday to send a fact-finding mission to Kiev in the coming days to launch a “preliminary dialogue with the authorities”.

SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine — Fistfights broke out between pro- and anti-Russian demonstrators in Ukraine’s strategic Crimea region on Wednesday as Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered major military exercises just across the border.

The tests of military readiness involve most of the units in central and western Russia, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said in a televised statement. He said the exercise would “check the troops’ readiness for action in crisis situations that threaten the nation’s military security”.

In Kiev, opposition leaders who took charge after pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych fled were working on forming a new government to chart a path forward for the country and its ailing economy. Parliament has delayed the announcement of the new administration, which was originally set for Tuesday, reflecting the political divisions among the various factions of the opposition.

When announcing Russia’s military exercises, Shoigu didn’t specifically mention the turmoil in Ukraine, which is bitterly divided between pro-European western regions, and pro-Russian areas in the east and south.

Three months of protests forced Yanukovych to go into hiding over the weekend as his foes set up an interim government following violent clashes between protesters and police that left more than 80 people dead.

In Crimea’s regional capital of Simferopol, about 20,000 Muslim Tatars who rallied in support of the interim government clashed with a smaller pro-Russian rally. One health official said at least 20 people were injured, while the local health ministry said one person died from an apparent heart attack.

The protesters shouted and attacked each other with stones, bottles and punches, as police and leaders of both rallies struggled to keep the two groups apart.

They started to disperse after the speaker of the regional legislature announced it would postpone a crisis session, which many Tatars feared would have taken steps toward seceding from Ukraine.

“The threat of separatism has been eliminated,” Refat Chubarov, the leader of the Tatar community in Crimea, told the crowd.

Crimean Tatars are a Turkic Muslim ethnic group who have lived in Crimea for centuries. They were brutally deported in 1944 by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, but returned after Ukraine’s independence.

The tensions in Crimea — a peninsula in southern Ukraine that is home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet — highlight the divisions that run through this country of 46 million, and underscore fears the country’s mainly Russian-speaking east and south won’t recognise the interim authorities’ legitimacy.

“Only Russia can defend us from fascists in Kiev and from Islamic radicals in Crimea,” said Anton Lyakhov, a 52-year-old pro-Russian protester.

According to the Russian defence minister, the military will be on high alert for two days as some troops deploy to shooting ranges. The actual maneuvers will start Friday and will last four days, he said. The exercise will involve ships of the Baltic and the Northern Fleets, and the air force.

The order came a day after a Russian lawmaker visiting Crimea said Moscow would protect the region’s Russian-speaking residents, raising concerns that Russia might make a military move into Ukraine.

“We take it for granted that all nations respect the sovereignty, and independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine, and this is a message that we have also conveyed to whom it may concern,” NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said.

On Wednesday, Yanukovych’s three predecessors as president issued a statement accusing Russia of “direct interference in the political life of Crimea”.

Russian officials denied any plans to move militarily on Ukraine.

“That scenario is impossible,” said Valentina Matvienko, speaker of the upper chamber of Russia’s parliament, known as the Federation Council. She is a close Putin ally and was born in western Ukraine.

“Russia has been stating and reiterating its stance that we have no right and cannot interfere in domestic affairs of a sovereign state,” she said. “We are for Ukraine as a united state, and there should be no basis for separatist sentiments.”

In Kiev, the capital, protesters who have demanded that the new government be close to the people, cut down a fence surrounding the Parliament building.

Ukraine’s acting interior minister ordered the disbandment of a feared riot police force known as Berkut, which protesters blamed for violent attacks against peaceful demonstrators.

The force, whose name means “golden eagle”, consisted of about 5,000 officers. It was unclear Wednesday whether its members would be dismissed or reassigned to other units.

Protesters took to the streets after Yanukovych’s decision in November to reject an agreement that would strengthen ties with the EU and instead seek closer cooperation with Moscow.

Anti-Yanukovych protesters set up a camp on Kiev’s Independence Square, known as the Maidan, demonstrating against corruption and human rights abuses, and calling for the president’s resignation.

Under an EU-mediated plan, Yanukovych and protest leaders agreed to form a new government and hold an early election, but Parliament later voted to remove him from the presidency. The protesters took control of Kiev and seized the president’s office as Yanukovych fled the capital. His whereabouts are unknown.

In Lviv, a major city in the European-leaning west of Ukraine, leading cultural figures tried to defuse the tensions between the Russian-speaking east and the Ukrainian-speaking west, calling on residents to speak only Russian on Wednesday in a symbolic show of solidarity.

The call appeared to have had some effect.

“You can really hear a lot of Russian spoken on the streets of Lviv today,” said Konstantin Beglov, one of the campaign’s promoters, “although it often leads to funny situations because Lviv residents hardly ever speak Russian”.