About 2,000 anti-government protesters yesterday huddled by braziers in their main tented camp in snowbound Kiev, in defiance of riot police who herded them away from government buildings overnight.
Dozens of riot police removed barricades leading to the offices of the president, Cabinet and parliament. Protesters regrouped at Independence Square in central Kiev, where they have set up a makeshift tent village, complete with a stage where singers and speakers provide around-the-clock entertainment.
The president’s standard, a blue flag with a gold trident in the center, flew outside his office, signaling that Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was at work — possibly the first time since protests erupted on Nov. 21 over his decision to scrap a trade pact with the EU in favor of closer ties with Russia.
Photo: AFP
Demonstrators had feared the arrival of the riot police on Monday heralded a plan to crush the protests, but there was none of the violence seen last week, when dozens of protesters were wounded.
With the crisis weighing on an economy already on the brink of bankruptcy, Yanukovych was to hold talks with three former Ukrainian presidents yesterday. He was expected to meet EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton yesterday or today.
Ilya Shutov, a former miner from the eastern city of Donetsk, said the protesters would stay until Yanukovych left office.
“We were for the EU association agreement because we thought it would force our authorities to be civilised. Their refusal of Europe is a refusal to be civilized,” he said.
“Our goal is to get rid of the Soviet-like authorities,” he said.
Visiting Moscow, US Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland made a new appeal for calm in Kiev.
She “expressed US deep concern about the situation in Ukraine, and urged Russia to use its influence to press for peace, human dignity and a political solution,” the US embassy in Moscow said in a statement.
“The US supports Ukraine’s European choice, a non-violent and just political resolution to the current standoff, and a return to economic health with the support of the International Monetary Fund,” it said.
However, Russia’s lower house of parliament was expected to approve a statement rejecting interference in Ukraine by Western politicians, following a visit to the protests last week by Germany’s foreign minister.
In Kiev, liberals and nationalists have taken to the streets for demonstrations that have at times drawn hundreds of thousands. Thousands have also maintained an around-the-clock protest camp in the city center, blocked roads, besieged government buildings and occupied the capital’s city hall.
Hundreds of thousands of people marched on Sunday, the second weekend in a row that such huge crowds have vented fury at a government they accuse of returning the country to Kremlin control. In a potent symbol, they tore down and smashed the capital’s main statue of Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union.
A week earlier, baton-wielding police injured scores of people at similar demonstrations. The police have since held back from using force to dislodge the protesters, but gave them five days from Thursday last week to leave the streets.
The protesters say they will not go.
“We will stand here till the end to defend our rights,” said Sergei Kuzan, 29, a lawyer, part of a self-appointed security team ready to defend barricades at the main tented camp in Independence Square. “My task is not to let the police through, nor the provocateurs.”
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS