In a freshly ironed pink dress Irina was waiting on the scruffy dockside of Sevastopol for the return of her Russian hero. And, sharing the lot of military wives throughout history, she was being given short shrift.

“There is no information to impart,” barked a junior naval officer, spinning on his heel and returning to the supply ship, the Kyrill, just back from the brief nasty war in Georgia. Ever since Russia mounted an invasion of a fellow member of the United Nations, flexing its muscle abroad for the first time since the crumbling of the Soviet Union, there has been a new edge to East-West relations.

At the eye of the storm now is the Crimean peninsula and in particular Sevastapol, the city besieged by the British in 1854 and battered by the Germans in the Second World War. Nowadays it houses two fleets--the Russian Black Sea fleet, once the powerful instrument of Soviet global power, and the Ukranian navy. If the submerged conflict between the two neighbours were ever to turn violent, this charming, vulnerable city would be ripped apart.

“All I want to know is if my Volodya is wounded,” said Irina. The supply ship, just back from Poti on the Georgian coast, was the first to return. It had been damaged apparently by a Georgian shell, and it is moored suspiciously close to a large floating hospital, swaying gently in the oily waters of the harbour. Some two dozen relatives had collected just beyond the spiked fence that marked Russian military terrain in the sovereign Ukrainian city. All--a grandfather wearing battle ribbons, strained-looking mothers -- were convinced that the Georgians were ruthless killers: their information came solely from Russian television.

Yesterday the first proper warship slid into the harbour, met by small crowd of Ukrainian protesters, chanting their support for the Georgians. There was a scuffle with waiting Russian families but it petered out in the summer heat; no real violence but a sense that the war across the sea was turning Sevastopol, a strange blend of garrison town and seaside resort, into a nervous waiting room.

When, ask the Ukrainians in the port, will it happen here? Because Sevastopol is overwhelmingly Russian and across the lush penisula, with its tumbling vinyards and wheeling seagulls, the Russians are a strong minority. The Crimea, they say, is “nasch”--ours. The deep sense of entitlement is rooted in history -- the Russian Czars sent their rebels into exile in the Caucasus but treated themselves to endless holidays on the southern shores of the Crimea, sorting out their tubercular coughs and sexual ailments. It is the place of collective memories: writer Alexander Pushkin said he lived the three happiest weeks of his life here; later generations of Young Pioneers raved about the summer camps. Traditionally the Crimean vacation has been the moment when Russian city girls first fall in love.

But in 1954 Nikita Krushchev transferred the Crimea to the Ukrainian soviet republic; a mere technicality at the time, but now something much more potent. There is nothing quite as unsettling, or as dangerous, as the Russian sense of loss.

“Look at them, don’t they make you sick,” says Alexander Peshkov, a former rating on a torpedo boat on the Sixth Fleet, “the Ukrainian police dress like admirals and the Ukrainian navy dress like ice-cream salesmen.”

Peshkov,42, and my guide around the dockyards, considers himself a Soviet citizen first -- he even has an SU sticker on his car -- and then a Russian even though he has a Ukrainian passport. Since the Soviet Union is dead, his real loyalty is transferred to the Sixth Fleet.

In Sevastapol the Ukranian and Russian navy staffs sit in uneasy proximity -- though the Russians have the grander headquarters, just under the Lenin statue -- and there is the nagging question: what will happen when Ukraine joins NATO? How will the Russians try to prevent it, where will the new boundary lines be drawn?

“When we were together in the Soviet Union, then we were strong! Apart? Crap!” Alexander is not alone. The whole city seems to have made a brand out of the Russian fleet: its standard, the St Andrews Cross used by the Czars, is everywhere, on the vehicles of the truckers buying water melons at the roadside, in cafes, in front of the huge Russian Officers Club, the welfare centre for retired sailors. But even on the eve of Ukrainian Independence Day with the whole bracing for parades, you would be hard put to find the blue-and-yellow national flag.

Take away the base from the Russians and you are asking for trouble. Yet that is precisely what is planned: the Russian lease runs out in 2017. By then, say the Ukrainians, the Russians have to be out, lock, stock and barrel.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister, anticipating the problem and has started to expand a Black Sea site on Russian terrain, at Novorossiysk.

But it does not have the deep bays of Sevastopol, nor the space to cope with a fleet that numbers some 400 vessels, 160 fixed wing aircraft and helicopters and over 20,000 seamen. Expelled from Ukraine they would be as homeless as the Red Army troops driven out of eastern europe in the 1990s. So the Russians are gambling that when talks finally start the Ukrainian government will be more to their liking. In the meantime tub-thumping Russian separatists will raise the temperature.

“We should perhaps let them stay but on condition that they pay a market rent,” says Anatoly Hrytsenko, head of the parliamentary defence committe and a sharp-eyed critic of Ukraine’s true military potential. That could bring in around dollars one billion a year instead of the paltry 97 million dollars that are written off Kiev’s debt to Moscow in lieu of annual rent payments. The extra money would boost the Crimean regional budget, allow Sevastopol to modernise -- and perhaps get the Ukrainian forces up to scratch.

But none of this brinkmanship with the Russians quite explains the passions that are being stirred up over the Crimea. Two forces seem to be at work. First, there appears to be serious deposits of gas in the Black Sea. Admittedly very deep but if exploited they could reduce Ukraine’s need for Russian imports -- a big step towards genuine independence.And so, not for the first time, Russian foreign and military strategy is marching to the tune of Gazprom .

The second explanation was offered by an old friend who many years ago, in the days of Leonid Brezhnev, used to offer me onion-skinned treatises about the persecution of the Crimean Tartars. Now he, like many Tartars has returned to the region and is prospering: his neighbours, pruning the apple trees of their dachas outside Yalta, are retired Russian naval commanders. “I have found out this, “he says,over hot sweet tea on his porch,” Putin prefers admirals to generals. It is the Baltic fleet that will threaten Poland, the Black Sea fleet will police the Caucasas.Maybe one day we can patrol the oceans again. This is a KGB man who feels comfortable on water.” Later, when a taxi arrives to take me back to Sevastopol, a car draws out and follows me back to the port where the inhabitants still mourn the passing of the Soviet Union.

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