UKRAINE: The immovable mass of Ukraine's opposition protesters prepared to meet the irresistible force of government power yesterday as both sides converged on Ukraine's capital Kiev. Opposition supporters from across the country flooded into the city centre, which turned into a riot of orange flags and banners, writes Chris Stephen in Kiev
They surrounded parliament as, inside, their hero Viktor Yushchenko declared that the country "is on the bring of civil conflict".
Ominously, television showed pictures of long convoys of trucks and buses carrying police and special forces to bases ringing the capital.
Last night dramatic footage was released showing troops with armoured personnel carriers wheeling three artillery pieces into position by a city railway line.
The centre of attention was the handsome parliament building, high on a hill with a commanding view of the city and the Dnipr River below. More than 50,000 people packed the streets and parkland around, braving freezing winds to listen with the debates beamed to them via huge TV screens.
It was soon clear that the effort of the opposition to use parliament to cancel Sunday's disputed election result had failed, because government and communist MPs failed to show up, robbing the session of a quorum.
But the crowd cheered as they watched Yushchenko standing inside the chamber and proclaiming himself, rather than prime minister Viktor Yanukovich, the declared president.
"There may well be bloodshed, it is very possible, but we have to stay here as long as it takes," said high school teacher Maria Florko, who arrived the night before from the western city of Lviv. Despite fears of violence, the mood was one of carnival and celebration.
"We came last night and we're not leaving until Yushchenko is the president," said Dennis Terefera (24), who arrived the night from the town of Ivanofrankirsk in western Ukraine, with his girlfriend Maria Burlak (21).
Dennis had made himself a cardboard placard with a picture of an egg and the slogan Happy Eggs, a reference to the felling of Yanukovich during the election campaign when he was hit by an egg and collapsed, apparently fearing he had been shot. "The incident happened in my town, said Dennis. "We are so pleased, it made our town famous."
He said protesters from Ivanofrankirsk had been brought to Kiev free of charge in a convoy of city taxis, the drivers keen to show practical support.
"What we want is very simple," said Maria, wearing orange plastic strip around her arms. "We want an honest government, not to support the criminals."
This is a protest that has become a genuine mass movement, at least in the capital and the west of the country. Every second person in Kiev wears an orange hat, scarf or strip of plastic tape tied around their arm or some other part of their anatomy.
Shops and offices sport orange flags in their windows and staff of the national bank plastered the entrance's marble columns with orange Yushchenko stickers.
Car drivers find orange ribbons tied around the doors of their vehicles whether they like it or not and spontaneous chants and singing break out on the streets and tube train escalators.
Hotels near the parliament opened their doors to allow relays of shivering demonstrators to come into their lobbies, drink tea and thaw out.
In Independence Square, the demonstrators have solved the problem of keeping warm by taking turns to go down to a huge shopping mall built underneath the square.
There were cheers for the visiting Italian football team AS Roma as it drove in from the airport to play Kiev Dynamo in a Champion's League match last night, because the Italian team plays in the yellow and orange of the opposition. Dinamo plays in blue, the colour of the government; fans outside parliament said they would be taking orange rather than blue scarves to the game.
Fears of violence came from a combination of police and troop movements and a warning from the outgoing president, Leonid Kuchma, for demonstrators to respect the law.
Most protesters expect the city police to side with the opposition. When the occupants of one car of Yushchenko supporters asked a traffic policeman why he had stopped them, he opened his jacket to show an orange ribbon. When demonstrators began chanting outside a government office, a policewoman with an orange ribbon in her uniform appeared and ordered police guards inside the building to defuse tension.
But police from the east of the country, where government support remains rock solid, are another matter. The independent TV station Channel Five has been showing pictures of long columns of trucks bringing police in from outside to park in barracks around the city.
The opposition fears that the government will send a fifth column, disguised as demonstrators, to provoke violence and give the police the excuse to intervene.
These fears mean security is tight around the protest areas, with squads of volunteer stewards patrolling around the demonstrators in orange bibs.
Among the orange flags of Yushchenko and the yellow and blue banners of Ukraine are growing numbers of foreign flags, including many of the red crosses on white backgrounds of Georgia, which saw its liberal opposition triumph in elections earlier this year.
Olexy Prokopoyev marched down the street to parliament waving a Canadian flag as a symbol of his pro-Western aspirations.
"I work for the Canada- Ukraine Parliamentary Project, and those guys are so patriotic, every time they send us a consignment of books they put two or three flags inside," he explained.
"I was 11 when we got independence in 1991, and I remember the energy of the people. Now I feel the same energy."
That energy is fuelled by anger at a government considered corrupt and outrage that it would trample on elections. "People just feel that it is all so godamned unfair," said Prokopoyev. "They think the victory has been stolen from them totally."
With the city centre almost empty of police, the main opponent for protesters is the weather.
Not on the streets yesterday were mother and daughter Svetlana and Valery Simonova, who had been there since the weekend and had said they would stay as long as it took. After standing all night at a freezing barricade, mother fell sick and daughter stayed at home to look after her.