Russia to Deploy Reinforcements to Crimea Area

Russia's defense minister called on Tuesday for the deployment of reinforcements to Crimea and southern Russia, citing the worsening crisis in Ukraine and the buildup of foreign forces nearby.

Sergei Shoigu told a meeting of defense ministry top brass it was a "priority" to deploy a "full and self-reliant group of troops in the direction of Crimea", Russian news agencies reported.

He said the "situation in Ukraine has sharply worsened and the foreign military presence has increased very close to our border."

Shoigu said the "military and political situation" in southwest Russia had "changed significantly since the start of this year."

Russia is deeply concerned at NATO's move eastwards and President Vladimir Putin has accused the West of provoking the crisis in Ukraine in order to "revive" the military bloc.

NATO this month agreed to set up a new rapid response force that would be ready to deploy within a few days and also to maintain a "continuous presence" in its eastern member states.

Putin said last month that it was necessary to "implement all of the country's defense measures fully and promptly, including of course in Crimea and Sevastopol, where we have to de facto create military infrastructure from scratch."

Russia's Black Sea fleet is based in Crimea and Moscow announced in July that it had begun expanding and modernizing it with new ships and submarines.

Putin ordered the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in March, saying later he had righted a wrong by reclaiming a peninsula that used to belong to the Soviet republic of Russia before 1954.

Earlier, Russian police on Tuesday raided the assembly of pro-Kiev Crimean Tatars, activists told AFP, days after Crimean residents overwhelmingly backed pro-Kremlin parties in polls.

Authorities also raided the homes of two Tatar activists in what the leader of the Tatar governing body, the Mejlis, called the start of "direct repressions" against the peninsula's pro-Kiev community.

On Sunday, Crimea's residents joined Russians across the country in voting in the first local polls since the peninsula's annexation from Ukraine in March.

Crimea's 300,000 Muslim Tatars largely stayed away from the polls. Tartars were the peninsula's largest ethnic group until it was conquered by Russia in the 19th century and now make up around 12 percent of the population.

They also boycotted a March referendum in which a Russian-speaking majority voted to split from Ukraine and become part of Russia.

On Tuesday, around 30 police and seven armed men in riot police uniforms surrounded the Mejlis in the regional center Simferopol and taped it off, not allowing media to come close.

Police forcibly carried one journalist away from the scene, threatening her with arrest for taking part in an illegal protest, the journalist, Safie Ablyaeva, told AFP.

The police searched the entire building including the office of the head of the Mejlis, Refat Chubarov, said Riza Shevkie, the director of a charitable foundation called Crimea which also has offices in the building.

The Tatar community linked the raid to May protests against Moscow's decision to ban their hugely respected spiritual leader and Ukrainian lawmaker Mustafa Dzhemilev from the peninsula.

"The elections are over and the authorities have revealed their face at last. It is a terrible, monstrous face," Chubarov, who was also banned from the peninsula, told AFP from Kiev.

"From today, direct repressions have started. They have started with the Crimean Tartars, with their representative body. But tomorrow they will get to all the other Crimeans who express discontentment in any way," Chubarov said.

The Crimean Tatars are a Turkic-speaking Muslim community who were deported from their homeland by Stalin. Many returned in the late 1980s.

The United Nations and the U.S. have denounced rights abuses against the Crimean Tatars since the peninsula's annexation by Russia.

The deputy head of the Mejlis, Nariman Djelal, this month told AFP of a "clear campaign of intimidation" including searches of Koranic schools and the homes of activists.

In Sunday's elections to the Crimean regional parliament, Russia's ruling party United Russia gained more than 70 percent of the vote, while the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia received just under 8.5 percent.