Ditching Ukraine 97 percent of people in Crimea supported joining Russia, the final results of the much awaited referendum revealed.
In a televised press conference, Mikhail Malyshev, the head of referendum election commission at Crimean legislature, said a total of 96.8 percent of voters backed reunification with Russian Federation and secession from Ukraine. The referendum held Sunday witnessed a turnout of 83 percent.
For more than two weeks Crimea has been controlled by unidentified military, believed to be from the Black Sea Fleet.
The referendum was met with criticisms from the West and the Ukraine's new government. While the pro-western government described the referendum as 'circus' staged by Moscow, the European Union said that Sunday's poll was 'illegal and illegitimate' and its results will not be recognised.
Valery Ryazantsev, chief of Russia's observer mission in Crimea and a lawmaker from the upper house of the Russian parliament, told the Interfax news agency Monday that the results of the poll were genuine and there were "absolutely no reasons to consider the vote results illegitimate," reports the Associated Press.
The United States urged other nations to "take concrete steps to impose costs" on Moscow. "In this century, we are long past the days when the international community will stand quietly by while one country forcibly seizes the territory of another," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said in a statement Sunday, reports The Los Angeles Times.
EU foreign ministers scheduled a meeting in Brussels, Belgium, to decide on visa bans and asset freezes against Russian and Crimean officials responsible for capturing the peninsular region, reports Reuters.
US President Barack Obama in a telephonic conversation with Russia's Vladimir Putin, Sunday, said that the vote "under duress of Russian military intervention, would never be recognised by the United States and the international community." He also warned of the "additional costs" for Moscow after the US imposed visa bans last week, reports the Agence France-Presse.
The Crimean win could be economically challenging for Putin's government as Russia's stocks continue to tumble in the market. The Russians "know that there are costs to their action here. The costs are economic," Dan Pfeiffer, a senior advisor at the White House, said on 'Meet the Press,' reports the LA Times. "The more they escalate, the longer this goes, the greater those costs will be."
Crimea's parliament will meet Monday to officially ask Moscow to take over, and then lawmakers will leave for Russia for further talks, Crimea's prime minister Sergey Aksyonov said on Twitter.
