Afghanistan: Crimeans vote in referendum on whether to break away from Ukraine, join Russia --- SEVASTOPOL, Ukraine — Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to leave Ukraine and join Russia, election officials said Sunday, capping a heavy-handed campaign that blocked most voters from hearing a vision for any alternative to unification with Moscow. -- Mikhail Malyshev, a senior election commission spokesman in the Crimean capital of Simferopol, announced that with a little more than 50 percent of the ballots counted, about 93 percent had voted in favor of joining Russia. -- The White House and Western governments rejected the referendum, conducted as thousands of Russian troops occupied the peninsula, and are eyeing sanctions. Ukraine’s interim prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, dismissed the vote as a “circus” under the “stage direction” of Moscow. Russia has staunchly defended it. -- A vote in favor of seceding from Ukraine was widely expected; ethnic Russians make up 60 percent of Crimea’s population, and the region has deep historical ties to Russia. But the vote may only complicate the biggest standoff between Russia and the West since the end of the Cold War and increase security fears in the rest of Ukraine and in other former Soviet states. -- Tensions rose elsewhere in Ukraine on Sunday. In the eastern city of Donetsk, thousands of pro-Russian demonstrators rallied in support of following Crimea’s lead and holding a referendum on joining Russia. Clusters of protesters stormed two government offices. Pro-Russian activists in Kharkiv, another troubled city in Ukraine’s east, charged into a cultural center and burned Ukrainian-language books while several thousand Moscow sympathizers marched in the southern city of Odessa, according to the Reuters news agency. -- Shortly before midnight in Simferopol, with tens of thousands of people jamming Lenin Square and nearby streets, Crimean political leaders announced the preliminary vote totals. Fireworks exploded overhead while a male chorus sang the Russian national anthem from a giant stage and people screamed and hugged one another. -- In the Crimean Peninsula’s other major city, Sevastopol, local vote results were announced on a concert stage in the biggest square. -- Dmitri Belik, head of the city council, told the cheering crowd, “Sevastopol, we are in Russia! Thank you, citizens of Sevastopol, we did it with your help, and nobody is going to kick us out.”