KIEV, 24 November 2004 — Ukraine’s political crisis threatened to spiral out of control yesterday as thousands of opposition supporters surrounded the presidency hours after their leader Viktor Yuschenko declared himself president.
Hundreds of security forces cordoned off the presidency in the capital Kiev as demonstrators shouted slogans and c2alled on police to join the protest.
At an emergency Parliament session, Yuschenko took the “oath” of office and called on Ukrainian civil servants and police to cross over and join the mass demonstrations that have gripped the nation since the weekend presidential vote.
“Ukraine needs you, come over to our side,” he urged, as protesters camped defiantly outside the legislature, many waving the signature opposition color of orange, before heeding a call to march on the presidency.
“Form a column and come with us to the presidency. We will surround it and we will wait for them to surrender or we will demand that they do so. We will not use force,” said Yulia Timoshenko, another opposition leader.
Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin called for a peaceful resolution to the crisis, but attacked European concerns over the vote as “inadmissible.”
“We can’t recognize or protest because no official results have yet been announced,” he said during a visit to Lisbon. “I can advise others to follow our example.”
Putin, who openly supported Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich in the election campaign, contacted the pro-Russian leader Monday to congratulate him on his “open and honest” defeat of Yuschenko.
Yuschenko, the pro-Western former premier, warned in Parliament that the country “is on the verge of civil conflict,” as the western region of Lviv joined Kiev and five other opposition bastions in rejecting official results giving victory to Yanukovich.
Ukrainian Parliament Speaker Vladimir Litvin refused to recognize the oath of office, and the parliamentary session was attended by too few legislators to make a resolution binding.
“There has been no inauguration,” he said. “One must not provoke people.”
In a further sign of the deep split in the country, the regional government of Donetsk, an eastern pro-Moscow fiefdom, denounced the protests in Kiev and the Ukrainian-speaking western districts.
The council of Donetsk, from where the premier hails, called on Yuschenko and his supporters “to accept defeat with dignity and to accept the complete and irrevocable victory of Yanukovich.”
Meanwhile 150 Ukrainian diplomats, including the Foreign Ministry’s official spokesman issued a statement recognizing Yuschenko as president.
Yuschenko had called on the international community to recognize him as the real winner of an election seen by some observers as the most important in Eastern Europe since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
A victory for him would pull the strategically important Eastern European nation of 48 million people out of Russia’s age-old embrace and eventually put it into the fold of the European Union and maybe even NATO, shifting liberal Europe’s center of gravity closer to Russia’s borders.
