People hold Russian flags as they gather at Lenin Square after the end of the referendum in Simferopol, Crimea, Ukraine, 16 March 2014.More than 95 per cent of Crimeans voted for the Ukrainian region's accession to Russia in a controversial referendum on 16 March, according to preliminary results. The Black Sea peninsula's secession was supported by 95.5 per cent, while just 4.5 per cent voted for Crimea to remain an autonomous republic inside Ukraine: photo - EPA/YURI KOCHETKOV Dostawca: PAP/EPA.
Support for union with Russia was 96.6 percent, local officials said on Monday morning as the Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, said it would pass legislation without delay to allow Ukraine's Crimea region to join Russia, Interfax reports.
"I do not think there will be any delays in considering these questions in either the State Duma or Federation Council. We are ready to pass all the required legal decisions as quickly as possible," the Russian Federation Council's deputy speaker, Ilyas Umakhanov, told Rossiya-24 television.
Meanwhile, the EU's foreign ministers are meeting today and are expected to agree to impose asset freezes and visa bans on some Russian officials as a response.
"The referendum is illegal and illegitimate and its outcome will not be recognized," the European Council and European Commission presidents said in a joint statement, and EU foreign ministers "will evaluate the situation tomorrow in Brussels and decide on additional measures," against Moscow, they said on Sunday.
"We are all reluctant to impose sanctions because Russia will probably respond and we'll all suffer as a result. But Russia is leaving us no choice," Poland's foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski has told CNN.
"I don't see any freedom-loving country recognizing this patently illegal, unconstitutional referendum being carried out in haste and under the gun of a foreign army," he said of Sunday's vote.
Ukrainian soldiers stand guard at a checkpoint not far of the border with Crimea near the village of Chongar, Kherson area, Ukraine, 16 March 2014: photo - EPA/IVAN BOBERSKYY
Just under 60 percent of the 1.5 million in Crimea are Russian-speakers in a peninsula that was part of Russia till 1994.
Head of Ukraine's national security council Andriy Paruby claimed a plot by Russia to ferment conflict in the east and south of Ukraine to justify an invasion had failed.
"The plan has failed. Despite all the Kremlin's technical powers, we have managed to keep control," Reuters reports him as saying.
Ukraine sent more troops to the area around its border with Russia over the weekend, after recent violent clashes between Pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian supporters in the cities of Donetsk and Kharkiv. (pg)