MOSCOW -- President Vladimir Putin signed a treaty Tuesday to annex Crimea, describing the move as correcting a past injustice and responding to what he called Western encroachment upon Russia's vital interests.
In an emotional 47-minute speech televised live from the Kremlin's white-and-gold St. George's Hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace, the Russian leader said he was merely restoring order to history by incorporating Crimea.
"In people's hearts and minds, Crimea has always been an integral part of Russia," he declared before hundreds of members of the parliament, governors and others.
He dismissed Western criticism of Sunday's Crimean referendum -- in which residents of the Black Sea peninsula overwhelmingly backed leaving Ukraine and joining Russia -- as a manifestation of the West's double standards. Often interrupted by applause, Putin said the rights of ethnic Russians in Ukraine had been abused by the new Ukrainian government and insisted that Crimea's vote to join Russia was in line with international law and reflected its right for self-determination.
Putin said his actions followed what he described as Western arrogance, hypocrisy and pressure, and warned that the West must drop its stubborn refusal to take Russian concerns into account.
"If you push a spring too hard at some point it will spring back," he said, addressing the West. "You always need to remember this."
Putin's remarks were interrupted repeatedly by thunderous applause, standing ovations and at the end chants of "Russia, Russia." Some in the audience wiped tears from their eyes.
While Putin boasted that the Russian takeover of Crimea was conducted without a single shot, a Ukrainian military spokesman said one Ukrainian serviceman was killed and another injured when a military facility in Crimea was stormed Tuesday by armed men just hours after Putin's speech.
A brand-new news agency for Crimea's pro-Russian authorities, Crimea Inform, offered a different account. The source said unknown snipers fired at local self-defense forces, killing one man and wounding another, and also shot at the Ukrainian military, wounding one serviceman.
The conflicting claims couldn't be immediately verified.
Crimea had been part of Russia since the 18th century until Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred it to Ukraine in 1954, a formality until the 1991 Soviet breakup. Russians and Crimea's majority ethnic-Russian population see annexation as correcting a historic insult. Putin argued that today's Ukraine included "regions of Russia's historic south" and was created on a whim by the Bolsheviks.
But despite the massing of thousands of Russian troops on Ukraine's eastern border, Putin insisted his nation had no intention of invading other regions in Ukraine.
"We don't want a division of Ukraine, we don't need that," he said.
Russia said its troops were on the border just for military training, but the U.S. and Europe have called them an intimidation tactic.
Putin argued that the months of protests in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, which prompted President Viktor Yanukovych to flee to Russia, had been instigated by the West to weaken Russia. He cast the new Ukrainian government as illegitimate, driven by radical "nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites."
In response, Ukraine's new government called Putin dangerous.
"Today's statement by Putin showed in high relief what a real threat Russia is for the civilized world and international security," Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Evhen Perebinis said on Twitter.
The annexation "has nothing to do with law or with democracy or sensible thinking," Perebinis added.
"This is theft on an international scale, when under the cover of troops, one country has just come and robbed a part of an independent state," Ukraine's Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk said.
Displaying strong emotion, Putin accused the West of cheating Russia and ignoring its interests in the years that followed the 1991 Soviet collapse.
"They have constantly tried to drive us into a corner for our independent stance," Putin said. "But there are limits. And in the case of Ukraine, our Western partners have crossed a line. They have behaved rudely, irresponsibly and unprofessionally."
After the speech, Putin and Crimean officials signed a treaty for the region to join Russia.
The treaty will have to be endorsed by Russia's Constitutional Court and ratified by both houses of the parliament, but Valentina Matviyenko, the speaker of the upper house of the Russian parliament, said the procedure could be completed by the end of the week.
The hastily called Crimean vote was held just two weeks after Russian troops had overtaken the Black Sea peninsula, blockading Ukrainian soldiers at their bases. The West and Ukraine described the referendum as illegitimate and being held at gunpoint, but residents on the peninsula voted overwhelmingly to join Russia.
To back his statement that Crimea's vote was valid, Putin pointed to Kosovo's independence bid from Serbia -- a move supported by the West and opposed by Russia -- and said Crimea's secession repeated Ukraine's own secession from the Soviet Union.
He denied Western accusations that Russian troops had invaded Crimea before the referendum, saying a treaty with Ukraine allows Russia to have up to 25,000 troops at its Black Sea Fleet base in Crimea.
Putin traced the area's history, from the 10th-century baptism of Prince Vladimir -- whose conversion to Orthodox Christianity transformed the kingdom then known as Rus -- to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left many Russians of his generation feeling that they had been stripped of their nation overnight.
"Millions of Russians went to bed in one country and woke up abroad," he said. "Overnight, they were minorities in the former Soviet republics, and the Russian people became one of the biggest -- if not the biggest -- divided nation in the world."
"I have heard residents of Crimea say that back in 1991 they were handed over like a sack of potatoes," he said. "What about Russia? It lowered its head and accepted the situation, swallowing the insult. Our country was going through such hard times then that it simply was incapable of defending its interests."
Putin also spoke of the radically changed circumstances since 1954, when Russia awarded Crimea to Ukraine. At that time, he said, "nobody could imagine that Russia and Ukraine could one day become different states."
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia felt it was "robbed" of Crimea, he said.
Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev said in remarks carried Tuesday by the online newspaper Slon.ru that the Crimean vote offered the region's residents the freedom of choice and justly reflected their will, calling it a "happy event."
Gorbachev added that the Crimean referendum has set an example for people in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, who also should decide their future.
Gorbachev, who resigned as the Soviet president on Christmas Day 1991, has voiced regret that he was unable to stem the Soviet Union's collapse. He has criticized Putin's authoritarian policy but said Tuesday that he supports his course in the Ukrainian crisis.
Shortly after his speech, Putin attended a rally on Red Square where tens of thousands gathered to support Crimea joining Russia.
"There was always a Cold War, there was always an informational war. It's only recently that we've started to win it," said Boris Zhorin, 23-year-old ecologist at the rally with a poster that read: "Putin said it -- Putin did it!"
Similar rallies were held in numerous cities across Russia.
In Donetsk, the center of the Donbass coal-mining region in eastern Ukraine, 37-year-old businessman Aleksei Gavrilov hailed Crimea joining Russia and said Donbass also historically belonged to Russia.
"Ukraine is just a made-up, fake project which was created to destroy Russia," he said. "Everything that Putin said is perfectly correct, and I support him completely!"
Igor Nosenko, a bar manager, watched Putin's speech in Kiev.
"It seems that I am in some kind of surrealist world where a person is saying that white is black," he said. "It can be dangerous for the whole world, since it is absolutely unclear what this person [Putin] has in his head."
While not recognizing the referendum, Ukrainian authorities were preparing for the practicalities of the situation. The justice minister offered emergency accommodation in vacation centers for any Ukrainian citizens who want to leave Crimea, where the ethnic Russian population is a majority.
"My advice to compatriots who live in Crimea is not to give up your Ukrainian passports. You are citizens of Ukraine, and you are in effect hostages of the occupiers," Justice Minister Pavel Petrenko said on Channel 5 television. "People should make their own decision about revoking citizenship, and nobody has the right to force them."
On and around the Kiev square from which the protest movement sprung up, the loss of Crimea was not going down well.
"We had hoped the government, even though it is only provisional, would react quickly, but they have done practically nothing," said Vasily Volchenko, a 51-year-old retired career military officer. "If they think they can give up Crimea that easily, then they are quite mistaken. We will just self-organize, because we are not giving up our Ukraine to anybody."
Meanwhile, many in Crimea's ethnic Tatar minority were wary, fearing that Crimea's breakaway from Ukraine would set off violence against them. Soviet authorities had forcibly evicted the Muslim Tatars from Crimea decades ago.
Crimean Deputy Prime Minister Rustam Temirgaliyev seemed to confirm those fears, telling the RIA Novosti news agency that the government would ask Tatars to "vacate" some of the lands they "illegally" occupy so authorities can use them for "social needs."
But Putin on Tuesday vowed to protect the rights of Crimean Tatars and keep their language as one of Crimea's official tongues, along with Russian and Ukrainian.
Information for this article was contributed by Vladimir Isachenkov, Jim Heintz, Maria Danilova, Angela Charlton, Nataliya Vasilyeva, Laura Mills, Yuras Karmanau, Peter Leonard and staff members of The Associated Press; and by Steven Lee Myers, Ellen Barry, Alan Cowell, David M. Herszenhorn, Andrew Higgins, Peter Baker, Andrew E. Kramer, Alison Smale, Melissa Eddy and Mark Landler of The New York Times.
A Section on 03/19/2014