Ukraine's pro-Western leaders hope to join NATO but the people of this Black Sea port, where Russian warships are moored at the quayside, want no part of it.
"I just can't imagine that the boots of a NATO soldier may tread on this sacred land one day," said Vladimir, an 82-year-old pensioner, as he walked along the quay.
"We want no NATO here," he said, his World War Two medals jangling on his chest. "This would mean to betray Russia."
Sevastopol is in Ukraine but a majority of its residents are ethnic Russians and most regard it as a Russian town - at least in terms of history, culture and emotion.
That sentiment is reinforced by the presence here of the Russian navy's Black Sea fleet, and the fact that until 1954 the Crimea region that includes Sevastopol was part of Russia.
"Imagine a NATO base in Sevastopol!" Vladimir Putin, then Russian president, said with an incredulous tone earlier this year after talks with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko.
Ukraine says that cannot happen because its constitution bars the presence on its territory of any foreign bases other than the Russian Black Sea fleet.
At a summit in Bucharest in April, NATO states agreed that Ukraine and Georgia could eventually join the Western military alliance, though they did not give a timetable.
That angered Russia, which sees further NATO enlargement as a threat to its security and a new encroachment into its traditional sphere of influence.
This month Sevastopol was again at the focus of the tension.
Ukraine barred influential Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov from entering the country after a speech in the port in which he said Russia should take it back from Ukraine. Moscow responded by blocking a deputy Ukrainian minister from entering Russia.
