Following a day of extraordinary drama, Ukraine faces a new and uncertain future after the country’s parliament voted to impeach the president, and Yulia Tymoshenko, the former prime minister, was released from prison.
Viktor Yanukovych, fled the capital, and parliament voted to strip him of his powers.
However, those willing to stand by Yanukovych diminished by the hour as his aides fled Ukraine and the president himself was accused by border officials of a FAILED ATTEMPT TO FLY of the country.
The army said it would not get involved, and police in key eastern areas said they were “with the people”.
There are fears that, with Yanukovych losing control of the west of the country and Kiev, Russia may attempt to promote separatist movements in Crimea.
In a dramatic twist, Tymoshenko was set free on Saturday evening, heading straight to Kiev where she hailed gathered protesters as “heroes” and urged them to continue their fight until change had been secured.
“This is your victory because no politician, no diplomat could do what you have done, you have removed this cancer from this country,” she told them. Tymoshenko said she regretted not being with them as they manned the barricades and people were killed. “Every bullet that killed those people was a bullet in the heart of all of us,” she said. “You have to remember their faces, you have to have their faces before your eyes and remember their sacrifices,” she said.
“Now you have a right to rule this country and decide for this country. Ukraine has an opportunity to build its own future today.” Tymoshenko was jailed in 2011 for “abuse of office”, in a trial many said was Yanukovych’s revenge against his arch-rival. She spent much of her sentence under armed guard in a hospital in the eastern city of Kharkiv being treated for back problems.
Even in the east of the country, Yanukovych’s authority was eroding rapidly. In Dnepropetrovsk, one of the region’s biggest cities, the police force released a statement saying it was “with the people”, while in the eastern city of Kharkiv the mayor and governor were reported to have fled to Russia.
On the streets of Kiev and at the Maidan, after a tumultuous day in which the three-month protest appeared to have won a decisive victory, there was celebration, but also a sense that with the job finally done in removing Yanukovych, the real work now begins.
“So many things have happened these days, some pleasant, some not, it is hard to know how I feel,” said Denis Romanov, 30, an engineer. “Ukraine won’t ever be the same again, and I mean this in a good way. Ukraine has been reborn in these events.”
Mykhailo Gavryliuk, a Cossack who in January was stripped naked and humiliated by riot police, sat on a pile of sandbags with rain trickling down his face. He offered a sober view of the future, saying that this was not yet a decisive victory. “For that we need a leader who loves Ukraine more than himself,” he said.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/22/ukraine-president-yanukovych-flees-kiev