Ukraine crisis: Crimea votes

Beyond the question of Crimea's future status, the vote will likely influence future international relations in the region and beyond -- having put the United States and Russia on the kind of collision course not seen since the end of the Cold War. Preliminary results could come as soon as Sunday night local time. The United States, which says the vote is illegal, has already said it expects the Black Sea peninsula's majority ethnic Russian population to vote in favor of joining Russia. Moscow has strongly backed the referendum. Kicking off the polling in a prerecorded statement, Crimean Prime Minister Sergey Aksyonov called on the residents of Crimea to cast their vote "independent of nationalism and disintegration." 'Russia is an opportunity' Another voter in Perevalnoye, Viktor Savchenko, said he would never vote for the government in Kiev. "I want us to join Russia, and live like Russians, with all their rights," he said. Victoria Khudyakova said she also had voted to join Russia, which she sees as being "spiritually close" to Crimea. "This is deciding the fate of Crimea. So I came, because I think that as a Crimean it is very important. I'm raising a son, so it is my destiny," she said. "For me, Russia is an opportunity for our Crimea to develop, to bloom. And I believe that it will be so." As of 3 p.m. (9 a.m. ET), voter turnout for all of Crimea stood at 63.9% of eligible voters, with 979,019 votes cast so far, Mikhail Malyshev, the head of the Crimean Election Commission, told reporters in the regional capital, Simferopol. But Ukraine's Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, speaking in Kiev, dismissed the referendum as illegitimate under Ukrainian and international law, and improperly run. He said Ukrainian authorities had information from Crimea about voting irregularities, including people who are not Crimean citizens casting ballots, absence of proper monitoring and the presence of armed men. Malyshev said there was no evidence that people with foreign passports were voting in the referendum. He also said no "provocations" had been reported at polling stations. Kerry: We won't recognize referendum Russian artillery deployed around Crimea Crimea's place in Russian history Double voting? In Simferopol, voters filed into a polling place, picked up white and yellow ballots and headed to private booths to fill them out before d