Prez warns clashes threaten all Ukraine

KIEV: Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych on Monday warned bloody clashes between protesters and police threatened all of Ukraine as new fighting rocked the capital Kiev.
The clashes, the worst in Kiev in recent times, marked a spiralling of tensions after two months of demonstrations against Yanukovych’s refusal to sign a pact for closer integration with the EU.
Amid growing fears the police could act to violently disperse the protest, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka warned protesters to halt “mass rioting”, describing it as a crime against the state.
In a second day of clashes after 200 were injured in Sunday’s fighting, thousands of Ukrainians braved temperatures of minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) to take part in the standoff with police.
In the epicentre of the clashes outside the entrance to the iconic Dynamo Kiev football stadium in central Kiev, both sides hunkered down behind barricades.
The protesters lobbed stones dug up from the cobbled road, flung Molotov cocktails and threw fireworks over a 20-metre (65-foot) no-man’s land at police lines.  Police responded by throwing stun grenades and occasionally using rubber bullets and tear gas.
“I am convinced that such phenomena are a threat not only to the public in Kiev but all of Ukraine,” Yanukovych said in an address to the nation broadcast on state TV.
“I urge dialogue, compromise and calm in our native land,” he said in his first public comments on the violence.
Showing increasing impatience with the events, he added: “I ask you not to follow those who urge violence, who are seeking to provoke a split between the state and society.”
But even after his comments, some 10,000 protesters remained around the centre of the clashes, with the most radical using lasers to blind police firing stun grenades.
“Who, if not us, and when, if not now,” read a banner carried by one group of protesters.
The burned-out wrecks of half a dozen police vehicles torched and destroyed the day earlier were used by the protesters as a barricade.
Opposition leaders, including former boxing champion Vitali Klitschko and Arseniy Yatsenyuk, appeared unable to have any influence on the hard core of radical protesters and stopped short of supporting their actions.
But Ukraine’s jailed former prime minister and opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko came out in support of those clashing with police, saying she would be with them if she could.
The White House urged an end to the violence, with US National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden warning that Washington was still considering sanctions against Ukrainian officials. (AFP)