Crimean President Announces Takeover, Dissolves Parliament : Ukraine: Locked-out legislators meet elsewhere, vote to refer matter to separatist peninsula’s high court. Both sides pledge to avoid violence.

The president of the strategic Crimean peninsula announced in a radio broadcast early Sunday that he was assuming “full power” and dissolving the newly elected Parliament that had sought to curb his authority.

Lawmakers locked out of their white concrete-and-glass building by police held a session in another building and voted to declare the dissolution illegal.

Crimea is a potential flash point between Russia and Ukraine because its largely ethnic Russian population wants the autonomous region to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia. But Sunday’s confrontation pitted a separatist president against a separatist Parliament.

President Yuri A. Meshkov appeared to have the upper hand. Aides said he was working inside the Parliament building, and security forces loyal to him controlled Crimea’s main television station and the largest newspaper publishing house, according to reports from the capital, Simferopol.

The city was reported calm, however, and both sides pledged to avoid violence.

In a miniature version of the power struggle in Russia that ended in the tank bombardment of the White House Parliament building in Moscow in October, Meshkov, elected Crimea’s first president in January, has for weeks been feuding with the regional Parliament that was elected in March.

Ideology is not the issue; the Crimean Parliament is dominated by Meshkov’s own party, and both the president and the legislative body want more independence from Ukraine and closer ties with Russia.

But Meshkov had clashed with lawmakers over the choice of a prime minister and other appointments, and Parliament had canceled the president’s privatization plan, which would have distributed some of the former Soviet Union’s most lucrative vacation real estate.

The power struggle came to a head last week when the Parliament amended Crimea’s Soviet-era constitution to sharply restrict the president’s powers. Meshkov called the move “a coup d’etat.”

“Deputies are behaving like children being manipulated by some sort of a criminal mob,” Meshkov told Crimean television Sunday. “This is a Parliament out of control.”

He pledged to hold new elections in the republic within three months, and to draft a new constitution and submit it to a referendum in April.

If the battle between Meshkov and Parliament drags on, it is likely to put Crimea’s separatist aspirations on the back burner.

Last month, the port city of Sevastopol, home of the powerful Black Sea Fleet, declared itself to be part of Russia. The Crimean Parliament voted to back the city, but Ukrainian officials dismissed the move as illegal.

Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, who had met with Meshkov on Friday, issued a noncommittal statement Sunday calling on the two sides to resolve their differences “in a civilized way.”

Laws passed by Parliament last week would have reduced Meshkov’s power to choose his Cabinet and created a new constitutional court that could overrule presidential decrees and even declare the president unfit to serve.

Crimean Prosecutor General Valentin Kuptsov told the Itar-Tass news agency that Meshkov’s dissolution of Parliament was illegal. He then allowed lawmakers to convene an emergency session inside his office.

With 72 of the 98 lawmakers present, the Parliament voted 68 to 0 to reject Meshkov’s seizure of power and to ask the existing Supreme Court to rule on its legality, said Alexei A. Melnikov, deputy Speaker of Parliament. There were four abstentions.

If the court rules that Meshkov acted illegally, Parliament will put the issue of confidence in the president to a referendum, Melnikov said.

“Let the people decide on that,” he said. “We are not going to impeach the president ourselves. He had no right to depose us either, because we were elected by the people.”