DARSHANA SANJEEWA BALASURIYA 
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Russia seizes Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine
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Russian armed forces seized control of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula on Saturday, and the Russian Parliament granted President Vladimir Putin broad authority to use military force in response to the political upheaval that dislodged a Kremlin ally.Russian troops, stripped of identifying insignia but using military vehicles bearing the license plates of Russia’s Black Sea force, swarmed the major thoroughfares of Crimea, encircled government buildings, closed the main airport and seized communication hubs, solidifying what began Friday as a covert effort to control the largely pro-Russian region.
In Moscow, Putin convened the upper house of Parliament to grant him authority to use military force to protect Russian citizens and soldiers not only in Crimea but throughout Ukraine. Both actions — military and parliamentary — were a direct rebuff to President Barack Obama, who on Friday warned Russia to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
On Saturday, Obama accused Russia of a “breach of international law” and condemned the country’s military intervention, calling it a “clear violation” of Ukrainian sovereignty.
In Crimea, heavily armed soldiers fanned out across the center of the regional capital, Simferopol. They wore green camouflage uniforms with no identifying marks but spoke Russian and were clearly part of a Russian mobilization. In Balaklava, a district of Sevastopol, a long column of military vehicles blocking the road to a border post bore Russian plates.
Large pro-Russia crowds rallied in the eastern Ukrainian cities of Donetsk and Kharkiv, where there were reports of violence. In Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, fears grew within the new provisional government that separatist upheaval would fracture the country just days after a three-month period of civil unrest had ended with the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych, the Kremlin ally who fled to Russia.
Obama, who had warned Russia on Friday that “there will be costs” if it violated Ukraine’s sovereignty, spoke with Putin for 90 minutes Saturday, according to the White House, and urged Putin to withdraw his forces back to their bases in Crimea and to stop “any interference” in other parts of Ukraine.
In a statement afterward, the White House said the United States would suspend participation in preparatory meetings for the G8 economic conference to be held in Sochi, Russia, in June and warned of “greater political and economic isolation” for Russia.
The Kremlin offered its own description of the call, in which it said Putin spoke of “a real threat to the lives and health of Russian citizens” in Ukraine and warned that “in case of any further spread of violence to eastern Ukraine and Crimea, Russia retains the right to protect its interests and the Russian-speaking population of those areas.”
In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron said that “there can be no excuse for outside military intervention” in Ukraine.
At the United Nations, the Security Council held an emergency meeting on Ukraine for the second time in two days. The U.S. ambassador, Samantha Power, called for an international observer mission and urged Russia to “stand down.(The New York Times)
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