Ukraine Abolishes Crimea Constitution, Presidency : Black Sea: Measures taken by Kiev leadership give it broad powers over the violence-ridden peninsula.

Aiming to curb the unruly and increasingly violent republic of Crimea, the Ukrainian Parliament passed a package of laws Friday abolishing the Crimean constitution and presidency.

Lawmakers also ordered prosecutors to bring criminal charges against Crimean President Yuri A. Meshkov for “exceeding his official authority.”

The measures were the toughest Kiev has taken in its four-year dispute with the strategic Black Sea peninsula, many of whose residents want to secede from Ukraine and join Russia.

In urging deputies to pass the package, President Leonid D. Kuchma said: “In light of events in other areas of the former Soviet Union, we can no longer drag this out.”

Few listeners missed the implied reference to Russia’s bloody war against its secessionist republic of Chechnya.

Ignoring protests by the leader of the Crimean Parliament, the ordinarily fractious Ukrainian lawmakers displayed rare unanimity in voting to annul Crimea’s independence-oriented constitution and passing a new law granting Kiev broad powers over the peninsula.

“This has been building up for a long time,” said legislator Mikhailo Ratushniy, who visited Crimea recently as part of a parliamentary delegation.

The new hard line comes at a time of plunging popularity for Meshkov, who was elected Crimea’s first president in a landslide just over a year ago.

Last fall, Meshkov was stripped of all but ceremonial powers after a showdown with the Crimean Parliament. But that has not stopped him from continuing to issue edicts on banking, finance and taxation that, according to Ratushniy, violated Ukrainian laws.

“That subjects him to criminal penalties,” Ratushniy said.

Meshkov could not be reached for comment.

The Crimean Parliament, which recently spent a week voting to fire its Presidium and then voting most of the members back into office again, is also becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Neither Meshkov nor the legislature seems able to fight the crime wave that experts say threatens Crimea’s already fragile political stability. Deteriorating public safety has inspired Kiev wags to invent puns playing on the lexical similarity between Crimea and crime.

In February alone, two Crimean businessmen were killed, a hard-currency store in the capital of Simferopol was firebombed and unknown assailants opened fire with machine guns on a foreign car in the Black Sea Fleet port of Sebastopol, killing three passengers and wounding two others.

The peninsula’s premier, Anatoly Franchuk, told journalists recently that he has been receiving phone threats. Two days later, the Crimean vice premier charged with fighting corruption and organized crime was the apparent target of an unsuccessful bombing attempt.

Franchuk was appointed by Kuchma, and his daughter is married to the Ukrainian president’s son.

Some lawmakers believe that the threats against Franchuk persuaded Kuchma to crack down on Crimea.

“It gave him a personal perspective on how things have gotten out of hand down there,” one deputy said.

Kuchma’s tough position came as a surprise to many observers, who recalled his overwhelming popularity in the peninsula during last summer’s Ukrainian presidential elections.

Even Meshkov praised him as “a normal man” for his pro-Russian campaign platform.

But in office, Kuchma turned out to be much more pro-Ukrainian than many expected. Today he is more popular in the nationalistic western Ukraine, which shunned him during the elections, than in the Russophile, industrial eastern and southern regions that voted him into office.

Crimea had been part of Russia for centuries until it was transferred to what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954. Separatist sentiment has been running high in Crimea since Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

Ukraine’s Ratushniy dismissed the idea that Russia might come to Crimea’s defense, threatening Ukraine.

“Russia has its own problems now,” he said.