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Cease-Fire in Kiev as Opposition Leaders Meet With Ukraine President Ukraine’s Fragile Cease-Fire Is Met With Reports of Brutality
(about 11 hours later)
KIEV, Ukraine — After another night of clashes, protesters battling the police in the Ukrainian capital agreed to a temporary cease-fire on Thursday as opposition leaders planned to attend a second round of negotiations with President Viktor F. Yanukovich. KIEV, Ukraine — As opposition leaders negotiated with President Viktor F. Yanukovich to defuse Ukraine’s violent civil uprising, new evidence emerged of brutality by the authorities, including a video of a protester stripped naked except for boots by a group of officers from the feared Berkut riot police.
More than three hours of face-to-face talks on Wednesday afternoon yielded no progress and the opposition leaders have threatened an escalation of violence if Mr. Yanukovich does not agree to early presidential elections or make another major concession. The video shows the naked man standing on snow-covered streets, being photographed by one police officer while several others looked on. Another officer is seen grabbing the man by the back of the neck, forcing him to hold an ice scraper, then slapping him on the head and kicking him as he is directed into a police bus. Welts are visible on the man’s back as he climbs into the bus.
Earlier in the week, the three main opposition leaders — Vitali Klitschko of the Udar Party, Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk of the Fatherland Party, and Oleg Tyagnibok of the nationalist Svoboda Party — had spoken out against the violence, and urged continued peaceful protest focused on presidential elections scheduled for February 2015. The Interior Ministry, which oversees the riot police, issued an apology and said the episode was under investigation.
On Wednesday, however, after the fruitless initial round of talks with Mr. Yanukovich and other senior officials, the leaders said they were prepared to embrace the violent uprising. They issued an ultimatum, demanding a concession from Mr. Yanukovich within 24 hours. The video stood to further inflame demonstrators who were still reeling from the first violent deaths in the now two-month-long uprising, threatening to upend a fragile cease-fire. It seemed to reinforce evidence that the authorities or their surrogates were engaging in other brutal tactics, including the killings of protesters.
“Tomorrow we will go forward together,” Mr. Yatsenyuk said. “If there will be a bullet in the forehead, so be it. It will be an honest, just and brave action.” Mr. Klitschko said, “Tomorrow, if the president won’t listen to us we will go into attack. There is no other way.” There were also signs of spreading unrest outside of Kiev, the capital. In Lviv, the largest city in Western Ukraine, protesters occupied the regional administration building. The region is a stronghold of support for European integration, the issue that set off the civil uprising in November, and home to many of the most aggressive protesters on the streets in Kiev.
The protests in Ukraine, which began in late November, turned deadly for the first time on Wednesday. The General Prosecutor’s office confirmed that two men had been shot to death during battles with the police. A coordinator of medical services for the opposition has put the death toll at five, including two other shooting victims and a man who fell from the colonnaded entrance to the Dynamo soccer stadium, which protesters had climbed to hurl rocks and fire bombs. Demonstrators similarly laid siege to the regional administration in Rivne, also in the West, where they demanded that riot police officers deployed to Kiev be sent home. There were parallel actions in a number of other cities, including in Cherkasy in central Ukraine, where several thousand demonstrators briefly clashed with the police who protected the administration building and at one point fired several shots in the air, the local news media reported.
There were also signs on Thursday that protest activity was stepping up in Western Ukraine, which is a stronghold of support for greater integration with Europe and is home to many of the demonstrators on the streets of Kiev. In Lviv, the biggest city in the West, protesters occupied the regional administration building and Ukrainian news media reported that the head of the regional administration had resigned. The protests, while not clearly coordinated, were all in response to the increasingly ominous situation in Kiev, where demonstrators near the Dynamo soccer stadium had clashed fiercely with the police throughout this week, burning police buses, beating some officers, and setting large numbers of tires on fire.
The news site Ukrainska Pravda reported a similar action in the city of Rivne, where it said that several thousand protesters had broken through glass doors and occupied the headquarters of the regional administration. Among the most chilling developments were reports of demonstrators being kidnapped — in some cases at hospitals — or detained by the police and taken to undisclosed locations.
The demonstrators in Kiev represent a motley cross-section of the Ukrainian population, who in many cases are united only by their opposition to Mr. Yanukovich and their outrage over the government’s treatment of demonstrators and its efforts to suppress political dissent. Igor Lutsenko, a civic activist and leading organizer of the opposition movement who has been a strong advocate of peaceful protest, was grabbed early Tuesday morning at a hospital where he had brought another demonstrator injured by a stun grenade during clashes with the police.
Many of the men on the front line of the violent conflict with the authorities hail from Western Ukraine and are supporters of Svoboda, the nationalist faction in Parliament led by Mr. Tyagnibok, or other even further right-leaning groups, including an organization called Right Factor. The second man, Yuriy Verbytsky, was later found dead on the outskirts of Kiev. Another body was found in the same area and also showed signs of abuse, Ukrainian news media reported.
But those willing to risk being close to the violence are supported by thousands more who confine their activities to Independence Square, which has been occupied since Dec. 1. There, the heavily barricaded square remains peaceful, with a stage where opposition leaders make speeches and a tent city where many demonstrators have been living. In an interview from his hospital bed on Thursday, Mr. Lutsenko described being forced into a van by men whom he described as “very professional” and taken to a forest where he and Mr. Verbytsky were beaten and interrogated, but mostly kept apart.
The occupied Trade Unions building there serves as a makeshift headquarters, with a press center and a ground floor kitchen that keeps the demonstrators well -fed. On Wednesday, volunteers outside the building’s entrance were sorting through piles of shopping bags of medication and first aid supplies that had been donated to treat victims of the violence. Nearby, protesters with sledgehammers and pickaxes broke apart the cobblestones on the square and bagged them to be used as weapons against the police, in the conflict zone about a quarter-mile away. Mr. Lutsenko, who was beaten severely at times on the head with wooden boards, had a tooth knocked out and his left eye was blackened. There were bruises and cuts all over him. He said that at one point he was forced to kneel in the woods in front of a tree, a plastic bag was put over his head and he was told to pray. He said he was certain he would be killed. Instead, his captors left, and he trekked injured through snowy woods until he found a local resident who helped him.
The Interior Ministry on Thursday confirmed the death of an opposition activist, Yuriy Verbytsky, who was kidnapped earlier this week, along with an opposition leader, Igor Lutsenko, from a hospital in Kiev. Mr. Lutsenko said that his captors appeared to be former police officers based on the way they questioned him and repeatedly verified information that he supplied, and made clear they were aware of the cars and motorcycle registered in his name.
Mr. Lutsenko was released by his captors in woods on the outskirts of Kiev, and has written on a Facebook page that he was held in a shed-like building and at various points believed he was going to be killed. At one point, he said, he was forced to kneel with a bag over his head and told to pray. His captors inexplicably vanished and he fled through the woods. He said that he was held in a sort of shed in the woods, and that once his interrogators confirmed his leadership role, they demanded information about the opposition’s plans — an absurd question given the chaotic and unpredictable nature of street protests over the last few days.
The two confirmed shooting victims from the clashes with police in Kiev have been identified by local news media as Serhiy Nihoyan, 20, a Ukrainian citizen who was born in Armenia and had lived in the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk, and Mykhaylo Zhyznevsky, from the neighboring country of Belarus. The Belarussian authorities have said they are awaiting information from the Ukrainian government. “They were kind of sadists,” Mr. Lutsenko said, “really brutal.” Mr. Lutsenko said he did not know Mr. Verbytsky before being asked to drive him to the hospital to treat an eye injury, but that he believed he may have received harsher treatment because he was from Lviv, in Western Ukraine, home to many of the most aggressive protesters in the opposition.
The kidnapping of Mr. Lutsenko, and Mr. Verbytsky, who was later found dead, was part of a chilling pattern of abductions and assaults against opposition figures. Ukrainian news media on Thursday reported yet another disappearance. Dmitry Bulatov, the head of a motorist protest group called AutoMaidan, was apparently detained along with other members of his group, which leads caravans of vehicles in demonstrations against the government.
Ukrainian news media on Thursday reported yet another disappearance — of Dmitry Bulatov, the head of a motorist protest group called AutoMaidan, which has led vehicle caravans in demonstrations against the government. After continued clashes overnight, protesters battling the police in the Ukrainian capital agreed to the temporary cease-fire on Thursday morning as opposition leaders planned to attend a second round of negotiations with Mr. Yanukovich.
There were also signs of mounting international consternation over the situation in Ukraine and renewed calls, including by the United States, for a peaceful resolution to the crisis. The European Union said that its foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, would visit Kiev next week. The talks, scheduled for the afternoon, were repeatedly pushed back. Late on Thursday, two of the opposition leaders emerged from the meeting with Mr. Yanukovich to urge a continuation of the truce.
Meanwhile, Stefan Fule, the European official who had been leading efforts to strengthen ties with Ukraine through new political and free trade agreements, was expected to arrive in Kiev on Saturday. They said they had achieved a tentative agreement that would set free dozens of detained protesters and potentially create another occupied space similar to Independence Square, where demonstrators have camped out since early December.
On Wednesday, hundreds of pro-government demonstrators surrounded the United States Embassy in Kiev to denounce what they described as meddling in Ukrainian affairs. They also said that a package of legislation broadly suppressing political dissent that was rammed through Parliament last week by Mr. Yanukovich’s supporters would be revisited at a special legislative session next week.
The United States and its Western European allies have made no secret of their sympathy and support for the protesters in Ukraine. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, are among the high-level American officials who have visited Independence Square to show support for the demonstrators occupying it. There were howls of dismay among some of the protesters gathered to listen to the two leaders, the former boxing champion, Vitali Klitschko, who leads a party called the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform and Oleg Tyagnibok, the head of the nationalist Svoboda Party.
The United States has repeatedly called for a peaceful resolution and earlier this week announced it would impose visa restrictions on unnamed Ukrainian officials connected to the violence against protesters. The United States and Europe have said they would consider further action if the violence in Ukraine worsened. Mr. Klitschko and Mr. Tyagnibok said the authorities had also given guarantees that the police would not fire on protesters with live ammunition, something that officials have denied ever occurred, even as four demonstrators were shot to death during clashes with the police early Wednesday.
The opposition leaders, who head the three largest minority factions in Parliament, have struggled in recent days to command the respect and support of the demonstrators on the street. They were jeered and booed at a rally on Sunday to protest the new legislation.
Despite the urging of a continued cease-fire, it did not appear that Mr. Yanukovich had given any major ground. The opposition leaders had been demanding early presidential elections — sooner than the regular vote scheduled to take place in March 2015 — or the dismissal of some or all of the appointed government ministers.
Although the General Prosecutor’s office confirmed that two men had been shot to death during battles with the police, a coordinator of medical services for the opposition has put the death toll at five.
As the standoff continued, international consternation appeared to be mounting and there were renewed calls, including by the United States, for a peaceful resolution to the crisis. The European Union said that its foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, would visit Kiev next week.