Ukraine's interim prime minister, Arseniy P Yatsenyuk, was reported on Monday to be pursuing a high-profile diplomatic offensive in the United States and at the United Nations as a referendum approaches in his country's southern region of Crimea that could herald its secession.
At the same time, Russian troops that have swept into control of many military installations in Crimea were reported to be tightening their grip on the peninsula, taking over a military hospital in the regional capital, Simferopol, and a military base in Sevastopol, where Russia's Black Sea Fleet is based.
There were signals, too, that the Kremlin was focusing closely on events in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian feeling runs high. According to news reports, the foreign ministry in Moscow said lawlessness now rules in eastern Ukraine as a result of extreme rightists "with the full connivance" of the authorities who took over after the ouster of President Viktor F Yanukovych.
In Russia, Foreign Minister Sergey V Lavrov, was quoted as saying that Secretary of State John Kerry had postponed a trip to Moscow on Monday to discuss Russia's reply to American proposals for a solution of the Ukraine crisis.
In a meeting with President Vladimir V Putin, broadcast on television, Lavrov said that the American ideas "did not completely satisfy us," Reuters reported. Kerry had initially said that he would travel to Moscow on Monday but telephoned on Saturday to postpone the talks.
The encounter came as Yatsenyuk, battling to hold Ukraine together, scheduled talks at the White House on Wednesday - days before a referendum on Sunday on Crimea's future. The Interfax-Ukraine news agency said Monday that Yatsenyuk would address the United Nations Security Council on Thursday.
"Our fathers and grandfathers have spilled their blood for this land," Yatsenyuk said in a speech on Sunday. "We won't budge a single centimetre from Ukrainian land. Let Russia and its president know this."
He followed up that warning on Monday by accusing Russia of seeking to "undermine the foundations of global security and revise the outcome of World War II."
The war of words between Ukraine and Russia seemed set to intensify on Tuesday when, according to Russian news reports, Yanukovych, the deposed president of Ukraine, will make a public statement in Rostov-on-Don, in southern Russia.
The looming deadline set by the Crimean referendum, which will ask voters whether they want to join Russia or seek broader autonomy within Ukraine, has added to the challenges facing the international diplomacy.
"We can see that time is really very pressing," Steffen Seibert, a spokesman for the German government, said in Berlin on Monday, one day after Chancellor Angela Merkel again called Putin and urged him to facilitate the creation of a contact group to bring Russia and Ukraine into talks.
"There can be no playing for time," Seibert said at a news conference. "We are expecting concrete steps for the development of a contact group."
Germany has conducted intensive diplomacy in recent days, and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier will visit the three Baltic states late Monday and Tuesday, while Ms. Merkel is expected in Poland on Wednesday. So far, however, Germany's traditionally tight ties with Russia and all over the east of Europe have failed to improve what Mr. Steinmeier, according to his spokesman, has called the most difficult crisis in Europe since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
Government officials refused to discuss when Germany would declare the diplomatic avenue closed, and exactly when and how any European Union sanctions such as travel bans or frozen accounts would be imposed on so far unnamed Russian officials.
The maneuvering came one day after rival rallies turned violent in Crimea on Sunday, as Ukraine celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of its greatest poet, Taras Shevchenko.
As Ukrainians rallied, the leaders of several nations continued to pursue diplomacy. Like Angela Merkel of Germany, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain spoke with Mr. Putin, who, according to Mr. Cameron's office, "said that Russia did want to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis" and "agreed that it is in all our interests to have a stable Ukraine."
The German government said that Merkel had made it clear that any Crimean referendum was illegal and that it would not be recognized internationally. On Thursday, the chancellor said that if a contact group was not formed soon and if no progress was made in negotiations with Russia, then the European Union could impose sanctions on Russia, including travel restrictions and the freezing of assets.
According to the Kremlin's account of the call, however, Mr. Putin "underlined in particular that the steps taken by Crimea's legitimate authorities are based on international law and aimed at guaranteeing the legitimate interests of the peninsula's population" and that the leadership in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, was not acting "to limit the rampant behavior of ultranationalists and radical forces in the capital and in many regions."
The Kremlin statement continued: "Despite the differences in the assessments of what is happening," the three leaders "expressed a common interest in de-escalation of the tensions and normalization of the situation as soon as possible."
The new Ukrainian government and its supporters, the United States and the European Union, reject the legitimacy of the Crimean referendum, scheduled for March 16, and deny that any ethnic Russians or Russian speakers have been threatened or harmed in Ukraine.
©2014 The New York Times News Service
