That night Russian paratroopers landed on the borders north of Kharkov and east of Donetsk. Russian tanks rolled into position. Russian planes began avoiding Ukrainian airspace. Twitter filled up with phone shots of armour trundling through railway stations out of Karelia and Siberia. Knife-wielding mobs clashed in the east and the Russian foreign ministry announced Ukraine has lost control of the security situation.

The morning was sunny and dark as I entered the Ukrainian parliament, the Rada. Before the colonnades and the marble coated walls a table was laid out with pictures of the dead, the frames balanced by crowns of thorns. Piggy ancien régime officials from the ousted government eulogised the EU to the cameras. The eyes of teenage guards in camouflage uniforms stalked secretaries in painful stilettos.

From the gods, I felt I was watching the fall of Ruritania. In London, their fate was being debated by John Kerry and Sergey Lavrov. In the Rada, clownish new leaders vowed to prevent the Kremlin annexing Crimea. Boxer-turned-party-leader Vitaly Klitschko raised the Crimean flag at the podium. Hysterical motions were passed in minutes. The provisional government fluttered with nerves.

This was living through brinkmanship.This was Ukraine's Cuban missile crisis. Deputies reeking of cologne wandered in and out of the chamber wondering if there would really be war.

Collaborators could be found here in the hallway. Yanukovych had gone but his once-loyal deputies from the Party of Regions, representing the east and south, had gone nowhere. Anatoliy Bilznyuk, a deputy and former governor of Donetsk, had the hair, and air, of the Gorbachev generation. He stuck closely to the Kremlin script: there are no Russian troops in Crimea.

He accused the authorities: "When it happens in the West it will happen in the East. This government killed people in Donetsk. The people may call for Russian protection."

Politicians rushed out and began speaking about partisans. Bells rang. And I found myself with the soft-voiced Oleh Tyahnybok, leader of the nationalist Svoboda party, now in government.

Tyahnybok has a pub landlord's face. Russians call him a Nazi. But he was already speaking like the leader of the underground resistance. "The EU needs to support us harder. We need much harder support. The EU and the US gave us a guarantee. Now that's been thrown into doubt."

The Rada whistled with rumours. Russia was ready to strike: "If Russia occupies Eastern Ukraine, it is possible that my men will go and join the partisans to fight the occupation. I don't exclude partisan war in Crimea if Russia annexes it. We have power and army to defend ourselves but if Russia occupies our land . . ."