The sense that the other shoe is going to drop increased as Moscow stepped up its rhetoric regarding the massive shift in Ukraine’s political leadership.  The interim government has issued an arrest warrant for Viktor Yanukovich, now apparently the former President of Ukraine.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Ukraine’s interim authorities in Kiev had seized power in an “armed mutiny”; the new government is not legitimate; and has recalled its ambassador to Kiev.

“The legitimacy of a whole number of organs of power that function there raises great doubts,” said Medvedev, adding ominously, “We do not understand what is going on there.  There is a real threat to our interests and to the lives of our citizens.”

Most important among those interests is the deep-water port at Sevastopol, on the Crimean Peninsula where Russian is spoken instead of the Ukrainian language.  Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet operates out of there, and Moscow aims to keep it.

For centuries it was part of Russia, until Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev gave it to Ukraine in the 1950s – a transfer seen as of little consequence, since Kiev took its orders from Moscow back then.  But after the fall of the Soviet system, Russia has been forced to lease the port, the most-recent 25-year deal signed with Moscow’s pal, then-President Viktor Yanukovich.

He’s believed to be in hiding in Crimea, where the protests have been against the change in Kiev, and in favor of continued or even deepened links to Russia.  Yanukovich is believed to have relieved his security detail.  New Interior Minister Arsen Avakhov says Yanukovich and his aides are under investigation for murder in anti-government protests in which more than 100 died, and there’s a warrant out for his arrest.