President to return

Thousands gather in Kiev to demand that leader gives up power

UKRAINE’S embattled president said he would return to work after four days’ sick leave, as protesters filled Kiev’s main square yesterday afternoon demanding he give up power. Opposition leaders, addressing the crowd on their return home from meeting European and US officials, said they hoped for international mediation in negotiations with the government and for a constitutional change to limit presidential power.

Calling for a complete change of leadership after weeks of crisis that have divided the country and set the West against President Viktor Yanukovich’s Russian allies, opposition figures who attended a security conference in Munich said they would secure international economic aid if they were able to take power.

Yanukovich, who angered opponents in November by spurning a trade pact with the European Union and turning instead to Moscow for financial support, announced on Thursday he was on sick leave and has not been seen in public since.

Critics saw in that a tactic to deflect pressure for political compromise. On Friday, he signed legislation revoking unpopular new restrictions on protest meetings that has, however, failed to appease opponents who are demanding the release of dozens of people arrested in recent weeks.

Yesterday a presidential statement said Yanukovich planned to return to work today after an acute respiratory infection. “After undergoing required treatment, the president of Ukraine feels well and his health is satisfactory,” it quoted a state medical official, Oleksandr Orda, as saying.

On the capital’s Independence Square, focus of a sprawling, barricaded protest camp throughout the winter, thousands of people gathered to listen to opposition leaders despite a freezing wind and Arctic temperatures which helped keep attendance well below those of major rallies in recent weeks.

Vitaly Klitschko, a former world champion heavyweight boxer-turned-politician, said opposition leaders had discussed with senior Western officials in Munich bringing in international mediators in talks with the Ukrainian authorities.

“The democratic world has understood that there is no trust in the Yanukovich regime,” he told the crowd. “So we spoke about international mediation in negotiations with Yanukovich, so that afterward there will no differing interpretations of obligations.”

Arseny Yatsenyuk of the Batkivshchyna party, who turned down an offer last week from Yanukovich to become prime minister, called on the authorities to free 116 prisoners. The president signed a law allowing protesters to be set free, but only once demonstrators stop occupying public buildings.

Yatsenyuk also renewed a call for a release of his party’s leader, former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, whose freedom has also been a demand of the European Union.

And he said there should be an international inquiry into “the criminal regime”, held under the auspices of the Council of Europe.

Yesterday a protester who said he was kidnapped and tortured was flown out of the country after a dramatic stand-off between opposition leaders and police at the clinic treating him and a last-minute ruling by a Kiev court.

Dmytro Bulatov, one of the activists behind the Avtomaidan movement that has helped spearhead protests, was driven to the airport by ambulance and took a flight to Riga.

He will travel on to Lithuania for treatment, that country’s foreign ministry said. Bulatov said he was seized and held for eight days by unidentified captors who cut off his ear and drove nails through his hands after the deadly clashes in Kiev last month. – Reuters, AFP