Live Blog: Ukraine In Crisis (Archive)

Yelena Andreyevna, who identifies herself as a Ukrainian and gave only her first name and patronymic, went to the Kyiv Patriarchate's St. Michael's Gold-Domed Monastery, where she prayed that God would help extinguish the "malice" burning on the frontier with Russia.

Lyudmila says she is delighted that Russia has annexed Crimea. But the move shocked Yelena.

Lyudmila says she "loves" Russian President Vladimir Putin. Yelena is deeply critical.

"Let Putin realize that he doesn't need to be a destroyer," says Yelena. "He needs to be a creator. [Russians and Ukrainians] are friends and brothers, but that is changing. I don't support Putin. He has brought much sorrow for us Ukrainians."

As the cases of the two women show, the divisions roiling the country are not simply ethnic, or purely language-based. While far from black and white, the discord in the country also has an obvious religious dimension.

Russia's Central Bank on April 21 ordered the activities of four Ukrainian banks working in Crimea to be halted. The order affects the Crimean branches of Ukraine's PrivatBank, All-Ukrainian Joint Stock Bank, Kyivska Rus, and Imexbank.

Also on April 21, President Putin signed a federal law on protection of banks deposits in Crimea and Sevastopol "during the transition period."

Putin also appointed a new deputy commander of Russia's naval forces in the Black Sea. Putin named former Ukrainian Navy Commander Admiral Denis Berezovsky to be the new deputy commander of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.

Meanwhile, Putin also appointed Aleksandr Golublev to be the head of the presidential executive office.

"But masking the identity of its forces, and clouding the possibilities for international denunciation, is a central part of the Russian strategy, developed over years of conflict in the former Soviet sphere, Ukrainian and American officials say.

John R. Schindler, a former National Security Agency counterintelligence officer who now teaches at the Naval War College, calls it “special war”: “an amalgam of espionage, subversion, even forms of terrorism to attain political ends without actually going to war in any conventional sense.”

And one country, Mr. Schindler noted in an article last year in which he coined the term, that particularly excels at special war is Russia, which carried out its first post-Soviet war to regain control of rebellious Chechnya back in 1994 by sending in a column of armored vehicles filled with Russian soldiers masquerading as pro-Moscow Chechens.Continue reading the main storyRussia’s flair for “maskirovka” — disguised warfare — has become even more evident under Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer whose closest advisers are mostly from that same Soviet intelligence agency."

Russia will not allow a bloody conflict in Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.

"There has been a surge in appeals to Russia for saving them from this outrage. We are being put into an extremely complex position," Lavrov told a press conference in Moscow on Monday.

"Those who are deliberately pursuing a civil war, possibly, in an attempt to start a big, serious bloody conflict, are pursuing a criminal policy. And we will not only condemn this policy but will also stop it," the minister said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said authorities in Kyiv are violating the terms of the Geneva declaration and accused Ukrainian authorities of not being able to, or not wanting to, control radical forces in eastern Ukraine.

At an April 21 press conference, Lavrov condemned the deadly shooting near the eastern Ukrainian city of Slovyansk the previous day and laid the blame for the attack on supporters of "those who seized power in Kyiv."

Lavrov also dismissed claims about large amounts of Russian weapons appearing in eastern Ukraine referring to Russian media reports that the attackers of a pro-Russian checkpoint near Slovyansk on April 20 were using "American weapons."

Lavrov accused Kyiv authorities of failing to remove "illegal protests" from the squares in the Ukrainian capital, something Lavrov said was also a violation of the Geneva agreements reached on April 17 at a meeting he attended with counterparts from Ukraine, the United States and European Union.