Dozens More Killed in Fiery Battle for Kiev's Independence Square
As many as 35 people were killed in new clashes between police and anti-government protestors in Kiev, Ukraine, hours after a truce had calmed the bloodiest week in the city since the fall of the Soviet empire.
Mashable's Christopher Miller counted 35 bodies in the Kiev City Hall and Central Post Office, both of which are used by protestors as headquarters and medical offices. The buildings are adjacent to Independence Square, called Maidan, where the majority of fighting has taken place, and control of which was the main focus of Thursday's fighting.
The image above was taken by AFP photographer Bulent Kilic. "'m not sure how they caught fire," he writes. "[S]ome claimed it was the police who'd thrown the petrol bombs, others said it was the protesters.
A truce had been called between President Viktor Yanukovych and opposition protestors late Wednesday night, but was broken, the New York Times reports, by protestors who thought it was a "ruse":
The fighting shattered a truce declared just hours earlier. Just after dawn, young men in ski masks opened a breach in their barricade near a stage on the square, ran across a hundred yards of smoldering debris and surged toward riot police officers who were firing at them with shotguns. [...]
"A truce means real negotiations," [protestor Anatoly] Volk said. "They are just delaying to make time to bring in more troops. They didn't have the forces to storm us last night. So we are expanding our barricades to where they were before. We are restoring what we had."
The protestors managed to regain control the square, but at the cost of several more lives, making this week by far the most violent in the two months of protests against Yanukovych's strong pro-Russia policies. The U.S. and E.U. have called for sanctions against Yanukovych's regime.