President Viktor Yanukovich’s sudden, surprise departure from Kiev is the beginning of a long ordeal for Ukrainians. It’s also the start of a major threat to the several hundred thousand Ukrainian Jews.

Anti-Semitic violence in Ukraine may come as a surprise to an American audience accustomed to optimistic portrayals of the swiftly changing events in U.S. media. The last weeks have been dominated by talk of vigils for democracy, for the EU, for Western ways, played out for the cameras in the bonfire-lit Independence Square.

The Russian media, by contrast, have devoted time, since autumn, to explicating the virulent history of the ultranationalist neo-Nazi parties from western Ukraine that rally under the black and red flag of the grandfather of Ukrainian fascist parties, the 85-year-old Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Its flag can be seen in pictures of the parliament building surrounded by masked and helmeted protesters.

In her Sunday appearance to discuss the crisis on “Meet the Press,” National Security Adviser Susan Rice was not asked about the fears of the Jews of Ukraine. Nor has the White House mentioned Jews or anti-Semitism during the several remarks directed at Moscow advising Russian President Vladimir Putin not to intervene in the Ukrainian chaos.

The Cimmerians, Bulgars, Greeks, Scythians, Goths, Huns, Khazars, the state of Kievan Rus', Byzantine Greeks, Kipchaks, Ottoman Turks, Golden Horde Tatars and the Mongols each controlled Crimea in its earlier history. In the 13th century, it was partly controlled by the Venetians and by the Genoese; they were followed by the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire in the 15th to 18th centuries, the Russian Empire in the 18th to 20th centuries, Germany during World War II and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and later the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, within the Soviet Union during the rest of the 20th century until Crimea became part of independent Ukraine with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

To many in Ukraine, a full-scale Russian military invasion would feel like a liberation. On Saturday, across the country’s eastern and southern provinces, hundreds of thousands of people gathered to welcome the Kremlin’s talk of protecting pro-Russian Ukrainians against the revolution that brought a new government to power last week. So far, that protection has come in the form of Russian military control of the southern region of Crimea, but on Saturday, Russian President Vladimir Putin got parliamentary approval for a broad military intervention in Ukraine. As that news spread, locals in at least four major cities in the east of Ukraine climbed onto the roofs of government buildings and replaced the Ukrainian flag with the Russian tricolor.

For the most part, what drove so many people to renounce their allegiance to Ukraine was a mix of pride and fear, the latter fueled in part by misinformation from Moscow. The most apparent deception came on Saturday morning, when the Russian Foreign Ministry put out a statement accusing the new government in Kiev of staging a “treacherous provocation” on the Crimean Peninsula. It claimed that “unidentified armed men” had been sent from Kiev to seize the headquarters of the Interior Ministry police in Crimea. But thanks to the “decisive actions of self-defense battalions,” the statement said, the attack had been averted with just a few casualties. This statement turned out to be without any basis in fact. (snip)

Within two days of taking power, the revolutionary leaders passed a bill revoking the rights of Ukraine’s regions to make Russian an official language alongside Ukrainian. That outraged the Russian-speaking half of the country, and the ban was quickly lifted. But the damage was done. With that one ill-considered piece of legislation, the new leaders had convinced millions of ethnic Russians that a wave of repression awaited them. So it was no surprise on Friday when a livid mob in Crimea attacked a liberal lawmaker who came to reason with them. Struggling to make his case over the screaming throng, Petro Poroshenko was chased back to his car amid cries of “Fascist!”

Making matters worse has been the role of nationalist parties in the new government, including a small but influential group of right-wing radicals known as Pravy Sektor (Right Sector), which embodies some of the greatest fears of Ukraine’s ethnic Russian minority. Its leader, Dmitro Yarosh, has openly referred to Russia as the “centuries-old enemy of Ukraine” and has spent years training a small paramilitary force to fight what he calls “Russian imperialist ambitions.”

In the past week, Ukraine’s new leaders have been scrambling to figure out what to do with Yarosh. His role in the revolution was too significant for them to write him off. Having suffered dozens of casualties in fighting off police during deadly clashes in Kiev last month, his militia members are idolized as heroes by many supporters of the revolution across the country. “It’s a real problem,” says the pro-Western lawmaker Hrihory Nemiriya, whose fellow members of the Fatherland party now hold the interim presidency and premiership. “Right Sector people are very popular, but they are not in the government.”

A day after what seemed to be the start of a full-scale Russian offensive, however, Mr. Shevtsov and just about everyone else are trying to figure out what it is exactly that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is up to. The swirling drama in Crimea has produced not so much a phony war — as the early and almost entirely peaceful phase of World War II was known — but a strange phantom war in which heavily armed men come and go, mostly in masks and in uniforms shorn of all markings, to confront an enemy nobody has actually seen, except in imaginations agitated by Russian television.

At the headquarters of a newly established pro-Russian self-defense force in the city of Sevastopol on Sunday, would-be recruits gathered beneath a Russian flag and frothed with fury at the “fascists” who they believe have seized power in Kiev and are now preparing to flood into Crimea to plunder and kill anybody who speaks Russian instead of Ukrainian.

“We haven’t seen any of them here yet, but we have seen them on TV,” said Stanislav Nagorny, an aide to the leader of the self-defense force, whose name he said he could not reveal. The mystery commander, he added, “is very, very busy preparing to defend the city.”

"We are all Ukrainians," McCain said in an interview with TIME magazine published Friday. The comments came ahead of President Barack Obama's announcement that he would address the events.

McCain said that Russian President Vladimir Putin thinks "this is a chess match reminiscent of the Cold War and we need to realize that and act accordingly." The senior senator from Arizona added that that didn't mean he foresaw "a conflict with Russia, but we need to take certain measures that would convince Putin that there is a very high cost to actions that he is taking now."

The comment was a near carbon copy to what McCain said in 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia. At the time McCain said, "I know I speak for every American I say to him today, we are all Georgians."