An Unfinished Ukraine Palace and a Fugitive Leader’s Folly

Work on a retreat for Viktor F. Yanukovych stopped after his ouster as Ukraine’s president.

LASPI, Ukraine — Chased from his sumptuous villa outside the Ukrainian capital and last sighted searching for a sanctuary here on the Crimean Peninsula, Viktor F. Yanukovych, the former president, suffered a final indignity on Tuesday: The masons and electricians he had hired to build a Pharaonic seaside retreat in a historic, old-growth forest decided that he would never pay his bills and started hauling away their equipment and materials. 

The mansion, still under construction but even bigger than the palatial presidential residence outside Kiev that was overrun by protesters over the weekend, had been at least two years in the making, a gargantuan folly of excess just down the Crimean coast from the former summer palace of Russia’s toppled imperial family.

The main hall has a 40-foot-high ceiling and majestic view of the Black Sea, while living quarters downstairs feature an indoor swimming pool, a big hole for a hot tub and walls thick enough to withstand an armed attack.

Instructions left on the walls by builders identify what kind of flooring was to have been laid in each room, a mix of marble and wooden parquet.

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With a view of the Black Sea, the mansion was built in the middle of a supposedly protected forest. Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

“I thought it would be grand, but not this grand,” said Dimtri Pilti, the dismayed owner of an electrical goods shop in Sevastopol, a nearby Crimean city, who visited the building site on Tuesday as workmen began loading trucks with tiles, boxes of screws, metal wire casings and just about anything else that contractors could salvage from the abruptly frozen construction project.

Built on a steep slope down to the sea, the concrete mansion occupies prized land in the middle of the supposedly protected forest. Accounts vary of how the land, previously a semiwilderness area popular with hikers, was turned into a display of ostentatious wealth. According to some locals, it used to be owned by a trolley-bus company that suddenly and mysteriously went bankrupt, with its assets somehow passing into the hands of a Crimean political crony of Mr. Yanukovych. But others say the territory belonged to a state-owned road construction company that was privatized while Mr. Yanukovych was serving as prime minister in 2007 and ended up in his family’s hands.

An outfit called Ukrkievresurs, a subsidiary of the company that ended up owning the land, set up the companies that managed Mr. Yanukovych’s residence outside Kiev, provided all of its furnishings and owned his helicopter and plane, according to corporate records uncovered by Ukrainian news media.

The first anyone noticed that anything unusual was afoot, beyond Ukraine’s customary and highly opaque shell games with former state assets, was when workers started chopping down rare species of juniper and pine and erected a high fence around the previously open forest. Then came a new road, followed by a new electrical station to bring power to an area with little obvious need for large amounts of electricity.

A clear sign that this was no ordinary construction project was that, in violation of the law, the builders never posted a building permit, not even a doctored one.

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Now that work had ceased, it was unclear if the interiors would ever be finished. Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

Mr. Pilti, the shop owner, who used to hike in the area, said he quickly realized that the site involved more than just run-of-the-mill Ukrainian shenanigans, adding that he became “100 percent certain this was for Yanukovych, because only Yanukovych would dare build something like this.”

One of the contractors picking up his materials on Tuesday, who gave his name only as Sergei, said he had not received any formal instructions to stop work, but, “We watch television so we can see what is happening and that we are not going to get paid.”

A laborer called Viktor said he began worrying the project might run into trouble more than a month ago, when protests in Kiev first flared into serious violence and his paychecks suddenly became erratic. But even after the mayhem last week in Kiev, he kept coming to work and laying concrete.

He said he had finally decided to call it quits on Tuesday, and now hoped to get work in Russia. Crimea, which Russia transferred to Ukraine in 1954, is still almost entirely Russian-speaking and home to the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. It voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Yanukovych in 2010 — he received 84 percent of the vote against Yulia V. Tymoshenko, the former prime minister — embracing him as a strong and reliable leader who would hold the forces of Ukrainian nationalism at bay and strengthen ties with Moscow. Most residents cheered in November when Mr. Yanukovych rejected a trade deal with the European Union and turned to Moscow instead.

It therefore came as little surprise when Ukraine’s new interim interior minister announced on Monday that, after Mr. Yanukovych had fled Kiev overnight Friday for the east of the country, he had resurfaced over the weekend here in Crimea. He apparently judged it a safe and sympathetic place to hide out from a new government in Kiev that wants him put on trial for mass murder, a trial which, if held in Ukraine, would probably lead to his execution.

But, it seems Mr. Yanukovych has worn out his welcome even here.

Some, like Danil Romanenko, an aged but still militant Cossack leader, accuse him of cowardice for running away from protesters instead of simply deploying sufficient force to make them give up. “If I see him, I will beat him with my horsewhip,” said Mr. Romanenko, adding that “I will then let him go” and that he would never squeal to Ukrainian investigators now frantically hunting for the president-turned-fugitive.

Svetlana Pletnova, a retiree, said Mr. Yanukovych had been far too soft and had paid the inevitable price of weakness in dealing with fascists, a term many here use to describe the protesters who seized power in Kiev. But, she added, Mr. Yanukovych had also been far too greedy, worrying more about protecting his wealth and that of his family than the fate of the country.

Across Crimea, a favorite summer resort for the imperial and then Soviet elites, Mr. Yanukovych and his family, particularly his son, Oleksandr, a former dentist, commandeered choice plots of property to build luxury homes and establish businesses. These added to a substantial stock of state-owned property already available for the president’s use, including the seaside dacha complex at Foros where Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader at the time, was briefly held captive during a putsch by communist hard-liners in August 1991.

“Why does he need a palace every few kilometers? He thought he was a czar,” said Mr. Pilti, who was in Kiev on business during Saturday’s takeover by protesters and was staggered to see the size of Mr. Yanukovych’s captured spread outside the capital.

Sergei, the contractor, said he did not like the new government in Kiev at all but was “still happy about what has happened — it had to happen sooner or later.” Ukraine, he added, desperately needs a more open system so the people can clearly know what is going on when a valued public forest suddenly gets fenced off and cut down to make way for a private mansion.

His chief quarrel with Mr. Yanukovych’s opponents, he added, is not that they ousted a good leader, but that they, too, are deeply corrupt and will soon be building villas of their own if they manage to hang on to power.

“Everyone knew what was happening here,” he said, gesturing at the concrete extravaganza he helped to build, “but they didn’t say anything because they were doing the same thing, only smaller.”