Opposition leaders in difficult position after Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, refuses to call snap elections
About 1,000 protesters have moved from Kiev's Independence Square to occupy a government building in response to opposition calls to observe a truce with riot police after long talks with President Viktor Yanukovych ended without a major breakthrough.
Early on Friday, the protesters broke into the Ministry of Agricultural Policy building in central Kiev, meeting no resistance. The move followed the seizure of local governors' offices in several western regions on Thursday.
The government's failure to grant key concessions was met with anger by thousands of protesters manning the barricades in the capital on Thursday evening, while the anti-government protests that have rocked Ukraine spread to other parts of the country during the day.
On Wednesday, after three people had been killed in clashes with riot police, the opposition politician Vitali Klitschko had asked protesters in central Kiev to observe an eight-hour truce while talks went on. Klitschko had promised to "go on the attack" if Yanukovych did not launch snap elections within 24 hours, while Arseniy Yatsenyuk, of the Fatherland party, said he was ready to take a "bullet in the head".
The protesters duly extinguished the flaming barricade of tyres that had been set up on the frontline, and the two sides stood facing each other down, the carcasses of burned out police buses between them. But when the trio of opposition leaders emerged after gruelling talks with the president that lasted more than four hours, they had changed their tune, asking for more time and a continuation of the ceasefire.
"The only thing we were able to achieve was not much," a grim Klitschko told the crowd. He was booed by some of those at the barricade as he asked for a truce.
On Independence Square, the nationalist leader, Oleh Tyahnybok, who was part of the negotiations, put the idea of continuing discussions with the president to a midnight vote among the crowd, and it was overwhelmingly rejected. There are now difficult decisions to make for the opposition leaders, who have been unable to achieve their key demand of snap elections from Yanukovych but are uneasy about being held responsible for any further violence.
There were dramatic developments in the west of the country on Thursday as hundreds of people forced their way into the office of the regional governor in the city of Lviv, and forced him to sign a resignation letter. Oleh Salo, a Yanukovych appointee in a city where support for the president is in the low single digits, later said he signed the letter under duress and was rescinding his resignation.
France's foreign minister said on Friday that Ukraine's ambassador in Paris would be summoned over the violence in Kiev.
"I have given instructions to the foreign ministry to summon the Ukrainian ambassador in France today which is a gesture to show France's condemnation," Laurent Fabius said on i>TELE television.
theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Kiev protesters occupy government building amid uneasy truce
Shaun Walker
Fri, 24 Jan 2014 09:30:43 GMT
No comments:
Post a Comment