But the Colonel was calm, despite the standoff.

“There will be no war,” he said, after climbing back up the hill from a meeting with his counterpart.

“After negotiations with the Russian Federation, we have agreed not to point our weapons at one another, and that they will not enter the base.”…

“They identified themselves as Russian forces. They came from Sebastopol, but I don’t know where they came from before that,” he said. “I asked them what their mission was, they said ‘to keep the peace and prevent provocations.”

But at Perevalnoye, at least, there was no sign of the mass defections to the Russian side widely reported in Russian media.