Ukraine ousts president
Parliament steps into power vacuum left by the embattled leader’s flight
KIEV—The Ukrainian parliament in Kiev voted on Saturday to oust a defiant President Viktor Yanukovych and call early presidential elections as jailed opposition icon Yulia Tymoshenko walked free, capping three months of antigovernment protests.
Yanukovych vowed not to step down in a television interview from the pro-Russian eastern bastion city of Kharkiv while Tymoshenko urged the pro-Western protesters to keep up their fight that cost nearly 100 lives in the last week.
Appearing in a wheelchair on Independence Square’s main stage to a rapturous welcome from a 50,000-strong crowd, Tymoshenko said: “You are heroes, you are the best of Ukraine.” The fiery 53-year-old coleader of the 2004 prodemocracy Orange Revolution then broke down in tears.
“Do not leave Maidan (Independence Square) as long as you have not obtained what you wanted,” Tymoshenko told the crowd.
The parliament had earlier ordered the release of Tymoshenko— former premier and stalwart supporter of close EU ties who remained Yanukovych’s nemesis even when she was sent to prison in 2011 on a seven-year sentence for “abuse of power.” The parliament also stepped into the power vacuum left by Yanukovych’s departure from Kiev by voting to oust the embattled president and setting new elections for May 25.
“This is a political knockout for Yanukovych,” charismatic former-boxer-turned-opposition-lea der Vitali Klitschko said in a statement on Saturday.
“Yanukovych is no longer president.”
But in a television interview, Yanukovych denounced the “coup” against him and branded his political foes “bandits”—comments that won firm support from his backers in Moscow.
“I am not leaving the country for anywhere. I do not intend to resign. I am the legitimately elected president,” the 63-yearold leader who took office in 2010 said in a firm voice.
Bribery attempt
Ukraine’s border control service claimed that aides to Yanukovych tried to bribe border guards to let him fly out of the country on Saturday but he was prevented from leaving.
The army, meanwhile, issued a statement saying it “will in no way become involved in the political conflict” and the police force declared itself in support of “the people” and “rapid change.” The tens of thousands of protesters who had occupied the city’s central Independence Square discovered that security forces had all but abandoned government and presidential buildings, and that anyone was now free to enter unchallenged.
They and other city residents gawked in awe and anger at the ostentatious luxury Yanukovych had built up inside a private estate near the capital that featured everything from a private zoo to a replica galleon floating on an artificial water way.
“I am in shock,” retired military servicewoman Natalia Rudenko said as she looked out over the manicured lawns studded with statues of rabbits and deer.
“In a country with so much poverty, how can one person have so much—he has to be mentally sick.”
The US government welcomed Tymoshenko’s release while EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said: “We need a lasting solution to the political crisis. This must include constitutional reform, the formation of a new inclusive government, and the creation of the conditions for democratic elections.”
The president and opposition leaders signed an EU-brokered deal on Friday that included early elections and the formation of a new unity government that appears to have been superseded by Saturday’s events.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague sounded an encouraging note about the “extraordinary developments” in Ukraine.
Balance of power
The developments showed the balance of power in Ukraine swinging in the opposition’s favor and seemingly superseding a Western-brokered pact Yanukovych had signed just a day earlier with the opposition to end the country’s bloodiest conflict since its independence in 1991.
The crisis had erupted in November last year when Yanukovych dumped a pact promising closer ties with the European Union in favor of hewing closer to Soviet-era master Russia.
The months of Ukrainian protests had escalated into a Cold War-style confrontation, pitting attempts by Kremlin to keep reins on its historic fiefdom against EU and US efforts to bring the economically struggling nation of 46 million into theWest’s fold.
In a statement, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Saturday called on Ukrainian political leaders to do everything to maintain the “the territorial integrity” of their country.
Ukraine is divided between the Russian-speaking east and a nationalist Ukrainian-speaking west.