Another false dawn. Hopes that the ceasefire agreed overnight between President Viktor Yanukovich and Ukraine's opposition would hold were dashed as Kiev's embattled Independence Square again descended yesterday morning into open gun battles and fierce hand to hand fighting between police and demonstrators in the bloodiest day since the country broke from the Soviet Union 22 years ago. Bands of young men, eye witnesses say, had successfully launched an attempt to drive remnants of police out of the square, triggering the bloody fighting. Kiev's city health department says 67 people have been killed since Tuesday, 39 in yesterday's clashes.
The decision by EU foreign ministers to ratchet up sanctions against those responsible for the escalating repression was inevitable and entirely appropriate. The asset freezes and travel bans on specific officials will hardly shake the regime but they increase diplomatic pressure on Yanukovich's administration and send a message of solidarity to Ukraine's opposition forces. Complaints from Russia, Kiev's uncritical ally, that such sanctions are tantamount to "blackmail" are rich – it was Moscow which demanded of Ukraine that it break its rapprochment with the EU or lose $15 billion in aid.
There has been an ebb and flow to the popular movement against Yanukovich in the three months since he announced his repudiation of the accord with the EU in favour of stronger Russian links. But the sharp upsurge in violence from Tuesday reflects a danger of the country tipping into full civil war – the president says it is an attempted coup and the Russian Foreign Ministry echoed his language warning of a “brown revolution”, an allusion to the Nazi rise to power in Germany in 1933.
The main fighting has been in the form of pitched battles in and around Kiev’s Independence Square, known as Maidan, where exhausted opposition supporters have been camped out for three months and have thrown up burning barricades to fend of police attacks. But in Lviv, a bastion of Ukrainian nationalism since Soviet times, the regional assembly has also declared autonomy.
The revival of the protests has seen an increase in the ferocity of the fighting on both sides, with exchanges of live and plastic bullets for petrol bombs, stun grenades and other lethal missiles. Police casualties are running to dozens, they claim, many a result of sniper fire.
The political dynamics of the opposition are also shifting as far-right and ultra-nationalist militants take the lead in the street fighting and set the tone of the angry crowds. Mainstream leaders involved in talks with Yanukovich or European leaders are finding themselves outflanked in a process of radicalisation that feeds on itself and may make compromise, let alone a lasting ceasefire, increasingly unattainable.