Lines of protesters chanted “Heroes, heroes” to the dead, as medics carried bodies on stretchers through the crowd. Irina, a local woman walking to Independence Square to donate syringes for blood transfusions, reported that “This is brother fighting brother.” Protesters hurled petrol bombs and paving stones to drive the security forces off a corner of the square the police had captured in battles that began two days earlier. According to Reuters riot police were captured on video shooting from a rooftop at demonstrators in the plaza, known as the Maidan. The Ukraine suffered its bloodiest day since Soviet times.
The truce in the Ukraine has collapsed. Hundreds of masked protesters with shields, clubs and Molotov cocktails charged the police. Police officials have confirmed that some officers were taken prisoner but said they did not know a number.
Parts of the country, mostly in its western cities — are in open revolt against President Viktor Yanukovych’s central government. It is a decade long battle. What started as peaceful popular protests and the occupation of Kiev’s Independence Square by young pro-European Union Ukrainians over Yanukovych’s rejecting the pending EU association agreement in favor of a Russian loan bailout and closer ties with Russia and dubbed Euromaidan, in January 2014 morphed into deadly clashes across Ukraine pitting ordinary Ukrainians against each other and against Yanukovych’s special police unit.
The director of the Institute for Global Strategies, a Kiev-based think tank, Vadim Karasyov, told The L.A. Times “The opposition leaders seem no longer capable of controlling the protesters, among whom there are a lot of people with firearms now.”
Authorities reported that the death toll was 28 and that hundreds were reported injured. City medical authorities reported that of the dozens of people injured, most were with gunshot wounds.
In a statement Thursday, the Ukrainian Health Ministry said 28 people have died and 287 have been hospitalized during the two days of street violence.
Russian President Vladimir Putin “stressed the critical importance of an immediate end to bloodshed, the need to take urgent measures to stabilize the situation and suppress extremist and terrorist attacks.”
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