Ukraine President gave in to protesters demands, deal signed

 

Yielding to hard Western pressure, Ukraine’s embattled President Viktor Yanukovych has agreed to call early presidential election, cede key powers to Parliament and form a coalition caretaker government. Ukrainian and Russian analysts described Mr Yanukovych’s decision as total surrender.

The Ukrainian leader made the announcement on his website after marathon talks with opposition leaders brokered by the Foreign Ministers of Germany, France and Poland. The talks, which began on Thursday, went through the night and resumed on Friday. Russia was represented at the talks by human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin.

The three opposition leaders, Arseny Yatsenyuk, Vitaly Klitschko and Oleh Tyahnibok, approved the deal after “consulting” protesters in the streets.

Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski called the agreement “a good compromise,” but analysts said Mr Yanukovych merely accepted the opposition’s demands.

“What compromise are you talking about? Yanukovych has signed an act of capitulation,” wrote Vladimir Kornilov, a Ukrainian political scientist.

“The West has dictated its terms of capitulation to Yanukovych, who did not even try to resist,” said Vigen Akopyan, editor of Russia’s Regnum online news service.

Mr Yanukovych gave no timeline for the proposed steps, but Vladimir Oleynik, a senior lawmaker from the President’s Party of the Regions, said that within the next 48 hours the Parliament should vote on reverting to the 2004 Constitution, which took away from President and gave to Parliament the right to appoint Prime Minister and the cabinet. The Constitution was scrapped after Mr Yanukovych won presidential elections in 2010.

According to Mr Oleynik, a coalition government is to be formed within 10 days and new presidential elections will be held before the end of the year, about six months earlier than scheduled.

It was not immediately known whether radical protesters from the Right Sector group would accept the agreement between Mr Yanukovych and leaders of the Parliamentary opposition. The radicals wrecked a truce negotiated on Tuesday and unleashed deadly violence in Kiev.

Over the past three days 77 people have died and 580 have been wounded in clashes between protesters and police, according to Ukraine’s Health Ministry. The Interior Ministry said 16 police officers had been killed and 130 suffered gunshot wounds.

Late on Thursday the Ukrainian Parliament voted to call off an “anti-terrorist operation” the security forces had launched earlier this week to clear central Kiev from protesters. By Friday afternoon all riot police were withdrawn from the scene of recent fighting.

The agreement reached in Kiev is a setback for Moscow, which had been urging Mr Yanukovych to get tough with the protesters and do not let them “wipe their feet on the authorities like a doormat.”