On The Ground In Crimea

Vice reports on the standoff:

Natalia Antelava covers Crimea’s ethnic divisions:

“I don’t mind Ukrainians in principle, but events in Kiev showed their true Fascist face,” Valentina Nikolaeva, a seventy-two-year-old Russian Crimean, told me. “They want to exterminate us.” Every day, she joins pro-Kremlin demonstrators, who gather under a statue of Lenin in front of a local administration building. “Thank God for Putin,” she said. “He is the only one who will protect us.” Nikolaeva told me that she likes her Tatar neighbors, a comment that infuriated a man standing next to us, who shouted, in response, “Tatars are animals! They are waiting for a chance to kill us.” Nikolaeva argued back, but soon she and the man were surrounded by others, all of them shouting, and she was completely drowned out.

Previous Dish on the Tatars here. The second part of the Vice series is after the jump: