Protesters in Ukraine Try to Block Government Offices
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
Genya Savilov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Using burned vehicles as barricades, a protester
flung a Molotov cocktail in the direction of riot police in central Kiev
on Tuesday.
Overnight violence appeared to be the worst in at least a month for the
Ukrainian protest movement, as the country’s political crisis deepened.
MOSCOW
— Protesters in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, used the charred shells of
police vans burned in a riot the night before to erect new barricades on
Monday on a street leading to the city’s government quarter. Fighting
between protesters and the police continued through the day, after the
weekend rally, called in part to protest new laws limiting public
assembly, turned violent.
Yuri
Lutsenko, one of the opposition leaders, said the protesters would
revive a tactic from mid-December of fortifying streets leading to
government buildings to hobble the work of the cabinet and the
presidential administration.
“The siege of the government quarter will only intensify,” Mr. Lutsenko said.
By
early afternoon, it was unclear whether a meeting between an aide to
President Viktor F. Yanukovich and opposition leaders, intended to tamp
down tensions in the capital, would take place as planned. Vitali
Klitschko, the leader of Punch, a political party, and a former
heavyweight boxing champion, said the opposition would only meet with
Mr. Yanukovich directly, rather than with the director of the national
security council, as suggested by the government.
During
a rally in Kiev on Sunday, protesters attacked the police with sticks
and threw firecrackers at them, while the officers responded with tear
gas. The violence appeared to be the worst in at least a month for the
continuing protest movement in Ukraine, and it signified a deepening of
the political crisis in the country, the most populous former Soviet
state apart from Russia.
The protests began in November,
after the government of Mr. Yanukovich declined to sign a sweeping
free-trade agreement with the European Union. He later negotiated a package of financial aid from Russia.
The
fighting broke out on a side street leading to the Verkhovnaya Rada, or
Parliament, and near Independence Square, which has been the center of
the protests.
In
speeches on the square, opposition leaders denounced the participants
in the melee as provocateurs and said they did not represent the
aspirations of the peaceful protesters. But the leaders were also
powerless to stop the fighting.
By
midnight, the streets were a scene of utter mayhem. Those fighting the
police struck them with lengths of pipes and sticks, and hurled
cobblestones the size of soccer balls into their midst. They sent
fireworks whistling and sparking into their ranks, and threw what
appeared to be firebombs, blossoming into flames when they struck. The
police stumbled backward, patting at their clothes as fire burned their
metal shields.
The
riot police sprayed from a water cannon, in spite of the freezing
temperatures. Gazeta.ru, a Russian news portal, reported that 70 police
officers were wounded and 40 hospitalized.
The rally against the new laws enacted on Thursday drew tens of thousands of people, a smaller crowd than at the peak of the protest movement
in December but larger than on recent weekends. Protesters have
occupied Independence Square and several buildings, including City Hall,
since November.
Protesters said they were angered by laws seen as circumscribing the rights of public assembly.
The
laws stiffened the penalties for setting up tents and stages in public
spaces. They banned wearing helmets and balaclavas, a tactic of the
opposition activists to protect themselves against the police,
identification or arrest.
In defiance, many demonstrators showed up wearing upside-down kitchen kettles on their heads.
Video|0:58
Protests in Kiev Turn Violent
Protesters attacked the police with sticks
and threw firecrackers at them, while the officers responded with tear
gas during a rally in Kiev, Ukraine, on Sunday.
The movement’s leaders have struggled to formulate a response to the laws.
Arseniy
P. Yatsenyuk, one of the main protest organizers, announced a plan to
form a shadow parliament, government and Kiev city administration that
would operate under the laws of a 2004 Constitution that Mr. Yanukovich
had amended — illegally, the opposition says.
Late
Sunday, Mr. Yatsenyuk, speaking from the stage on the square, said he
had received a call from Mr. Yanukovich saying the government was ready
for negotiations.
Mr.
Klitschko, the leader of Punch, told the crowd that he was “announcing a
snap presidential election,” though the parliamentary opposition has no
legal grounds to force a vote if Mr. Yanukovich does not resign.
This
inability of the leaders to force political change under the current
Constitution or consolidate around a single leader in spite of clear
popular support for their antigovernment agenda in the capital became a
precipitating cause of the violence on Sunday.
A
leader of a group of protesters who arrived in a column of cars, a
movement called Auto Maidan, after the name of the square, took the
stage and said the opposition should choose one leader, and if it could
not, the crowd should march on Parliament.
Mr.
Yatsenyuk called this speech a provocation to violence. But some in the
crowd acted anyway, moving toward Parliament and clashing with riot
police officers.
Oksana Lyachynska contributed reporting from Kiev, Ukraine.
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