About 200 US reservists, whose arrival in Crimea in southern Ukraine sparked anti-NATO protests, will leave by Monday, but planned military exercises may still take place, Ukraine's navy said on Sunday.
"Half of them (reservists) are in the process of taking buses to Simferopol from where they will take a plane and return to their country," navy spokesman Volodymyr Bova said. "The other half will follow tomorrow (Monday)."
He said that the decision had been taken because the "reservists' contracts had expired" and that it did not mean the cancellation of the upcoming NATO military manoeuvres in Crimea.
"The holding of the exercises Sea Breeze 2006 will be decided by parliament," which will consider the matter on June 14, Bova said.
Several dozen anti-NATO demonstrators had gathered in front of the building where the US reservists were staying to observe their departure, he added.
The Sea Breeze 2006 exercises were designed to strengthen ties between the pro-Western government in Kiev and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).
However the Crimean peninsula, an autonomous region with Ukraine, has pro-Russia leanings as it has been the homebase of the Russian Black Sea fleet at Sebastopol since its creation by Catherine the Great in the late 18th century.
It was transferred to Ukraine in 1954 by then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev but remains populated largely by Russians.
Besides local protests in Crimea, the planned exercises also triggered reaction from Moscow, which warned the United States and NATO not too push too hard to bring Ukraine into the fold. Ukrainian authorities say that Russians have taken part in the protests, in violation of Ukrainian law. A leading Ukrainian weekly has said that the demonstrations have been masterminded by the Russian special security services, the FSB, formerly KGB. On Thursday, up to 2,000 anti-NATO demonstrators protested outside the lodgings in Feodosia of the US reservists.
While preparations for the Ukrainian-US manoeuvres were continuing, they would be held "only after adoption of a law" authorising these and other international military exercises planned to be held by the end of the year, Ukrainian Defence Minister Anatoly Gritsenko said this week.
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