AFP/Moscow

A former separatist commander in east Ukraine has said local authorities were loyal to Kiev during Moscow’s takeover of Crimea and lawmakers had to be “corralled” into parliament for a vote.
The claims from former pro-Russian separatist Igor Strelkov contradict an official Kremlin narrative that Russia did not put any pressure on local authorities and that they sided with Moscow of their own free will.
“Unfortunately, I saw no support from public authorities in Semfiropol where I was (at the time),” Strelkov said in televised comments posted on YouTube, referring to Crimea’s regional capital. “I did not see it. It did not exist.”
“Rebels assembled lawmakers to corral them into the hall so that they could vote,” said the pencil-moustached former rebel without providing more details.
“I was one of the commanders of those rebels. I saw that from the inside with my own eyes,” said Strelkov, sporting a tie and cardigan during political debates with a pro-Kremlin figure last week.
During an emergency parliamentary vote on February 27, the local assembly approved the candidacy of Crimea’s new prime minister Sergei Aksyonov after armed men seized the building and Russian flags were run up its flagpoles.
Aksyonov’s pro-Moscow party Russian Unity received just four percent of the votes in Crimea in 2010.
The closed-door session also called for a referendum on the future of Crimea to be conducted on May 25.
The date of the plebiscite was later pushed forward to March 16.
Strelkov, also known as Igor Girkin, said Ukrainian police and most army units remained loyal to Kiev, even if some were reluctant to carry out Ukrainian authorities’ orders.
He said that only Berkut riot police sided with the local population.
Under the Soviet Union, Crimea belonged to the republic of Russia until 1954.
Most of its Russian-speaking population voted to split from Ukraine in a controversial March referendum, while the peninsula’s 300,000 Tatars largely boycotted the plebiscite.
Strelkov said that the fact that Crimea was home to the Russian Black Sea Fleet was why the takeover was swift and largely effortless.
“If armoured carriers of Russia’s marine infantry were stationed in Donetsk and Luhansk, trust me it would be the same there,” he said, referring to east Ukrainian rebel strongholds battling against Kiev forces.
“It would be the same in Kharkov, Nikolayev and Odessa and everywhere,” he said, referring to Ukrainian cities in the country’s northeast and south by their Russian names.
The defence minister of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” and a resident of Moscow, the free-wheeling Strelkov was suddenly recalled to Russia.
He now heads the Moscow-based Novorossiya (New Russia) movement – a loaded tsarist-era name for what is now southern and eastern Ukraine – which counts some 26,000 members.