Ukraine and Russia faced off on Thursday in their worst crisis in a decade as Ukrainian guards erected a makeshift sea border with pontoons to prevent Russian workers building a dam near their waters.

Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, who cut short a trip to Latin America to deal with the crisis, visited the tiny island of Tuzla to view work on the dam stretching towards it from the Russian mainland.

Russian workers have pressed ahead with construction of the dam despite calls from the Kremlin to stop.

Ukraine's parliament called for international mediation as tensions have mounted, and on Wednesday Russian television's First Channel showed Ukrainian warplanes on exercises.

Ukraine insists Tuzla is Ukrainian territory on the basis of communist-era decisions dividing territory between it and Russia -- both then Soviet republics. Some Russian officials say Tuzla was once attached to what is now the Russian mainland.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov both called on authorities in Krasnodar region to suspend construction pending talks on border issues unresolved since the collapse of Soviet rule, Russian officials said.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich plans to meet Kasyanov in Moscow on Friday.

But Russian trucks and workers were piling earth on the dam on Thursday, journalists visiting Tuzla said. Ukrainian officials said work continued all night and the dam was now 109 metres (360 feet) from what Kiev considers Ukraine's border.

"The construction work was not suspended during the night and they are continuing right now," Anatoly Samarchenko, a spokesman for Ukraine's border guards, told reporters.

Ukrainian border guards were building three pontoon bridges near the dam and raised Ukraine's blue and yellow national flag over them, the visiting journalists said.

Russian officials, who surveyed the work by helicopter on Thursday, say the dam is intended to protect coastal communities and dismiss any notion the project was politically motivated.

But politicians in Kiev see it as an open threat to Ukraine's national sovereignty. They say if Russia establishes a bridge with the island, Ukraine's authority over its part of the Black Sea and Sea of Azov will be in question.

Post-Soviet talks have yet to establish final jurisdiction over waters in the region. Russian ships currently pay a fee to Ukraine to pass through the Kerch strait, the only link between the Sea of Azov and Black Sea.

After the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia and Ukraine squabbled over division of the Black Sea fleet, payment of gas debts and the rights of Crimea's ethnic Russian majority.

But in the past three years ties have improved, and Putin and Kuchma have exchanged frequent visits.

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