| BBC News | - |
Ukraine's
new interim President Oleksandr Turchynov has said the country will
focus on closer integration with the EU. Mr Turchynov was appointed
following the dismissal of President Viktor Yanukovych by MPs on
Saturday.
Yanukovich flees after uprising
Reuters
People light candles during a
religious service at a church in Kiev on February 23, 2014. Ukraine's
interim rulers, just 24 hours after ousting President Viktor Yanukovich,
began to unstitch his power structure on Sunday, appointing a
provisional leader to replace him and sacking his key ministers.
Picture: David Mdzinarishvili
Kiev - Ukraine's
interim leadership pledged to put the country back on course for
European integration now that Moscow-backed Viktor Yanukovich had been
ousted from the presidency, while the United States warned Russia
against sending in its forces.
As rival neighbours east and west
of the former Soviet republic said a power vacuum in Kiev must not lead
to the country breaking apart, acting president Oleksander Turchinov
said late on Sunday that Ukraine's new leaders wanted relations with
Russia on a “new, equal and good-neighbourly footing that recognises and
takes into account Ukraine's European choice”.
European Union foreign policy
chief Catherine Ashton will travel to Ukraine on Monday, where she is
expected to discuss measures to shore up the ailing economy.
Russia said late on Sunday it had
recalled to Moscow its ambassador in Ukraine for consultations on the
“deteriorating situation” in Kiev.
A day after Yanukovich fled to the
Russian-speaking east following dozens of deaths during street protests
aimed at toppling him, parliament named new speaker Turchinov as
interim head of state. An ally of the ousted leader's long-jailed rival
Yulia Tymoshenko, he aims to swear in a government by Tuesday that can
provide authority until a presidential election on May 25.
With battle-hardened, pro-Western
protesters in control of central Kiev and determined to hold their
leaders to account, lawmakers rushed through decisions to cement their
power, display their rejection of rampant corruption and bring to book
officials who ordered police to fire on Independence Square.
But
whoever takes charge as interim prime minister faces a huge challenge to
satisfy popular expectations and will find an economy in deep crisis.
Scuffles in Russian-speaking
Crimea and some eastern cities between supporters of the new order in
Kiev and those anxious to stay close to Moscow revived fears of
separatism that a week earlier were focused on the west, where Ukrainian
nationalists had disowned Yanukovich and proclaimed self-rule.
President Barack Obama's national
security adviser, Susan Rice, was asked on US television about the
possibility of Russia sending troops to Ukraine, which President
Vladimir Putin had hoped Yanukovich would keep closely allied to Moscow.
“That would be a grave mistake,”
Rice said. “It's not in the interests of Ukraine or of Russia or of
Europe or the United States to see a country split. It's in nobody's
interest to see violence return and the situation escalate.”
Yanukovich's flight into hiding
left Putin's Ukraine policy in tatters, on a day he had hoped eyes would
be on the grand finale to the Sochi Olympics. The Kremlin leader spoke
on Sunday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose foreign minister
had brokered a short-lived truce in Kiev on Friday.
They agreed Ukraine's “territorial integrity” must be maintained, Merkel's spokesman said in a statement.
British
Foreign Secretary William Hague was asked if Russia might “send in the
tanks” to defend its interests among ethnic Russians in the east and on
the Crimea peninsula, where Moscow bases its Black Sea Fleet: “It would
really not be in the interests of Russia to do any such thing,” he told
the BBC.
Earlier this month, a Kremlin aide had warned that Moscow could intervene.
It is unlikely the United States
and its allies in Nato would risk an outright military confrontation
with Russia but such echoes of the Cold War underline the high stakes in
Ukraine, whose 46 million people and sprawling territory are caught in a
geopolitical tug of war.
EU officials offered financial aid
to a new government and to revive a trade deal that Yanukovich spurned
under Russian pressure in November, sparking the protests that drove him
from office after 82 deaths last week, many from police sniper fire.
In addition to any economic
assistance the EU might offer, the US has also promised help. Budgets
are tight on both sides of the Atlantic, and international creditors may
be wary of Yanukovich's opponents, whose previous spell in government
was no economic success, but a desire to avoid instability and back what
looks to Western voters like a democratic movement menaced by Russian
diktat may loosen purse strings, at least to tide Ukraine over until
elections.
In Russia, where Putin had wanted
Ukraine as a key part in a union of ex-Soviet states, the finance
minister said the next tranche of a $15-billion loan package agreed in
December would not be paid, at least before a new government is formed.
Russian
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, according to his office, told US
Secretary of State John Kerry the opposition had “seized power” by force
by ignoring an EU-brokered truce that would have left Yanukovich in
office for the time being.
But even lawmakers from
Yanukovich's own party voted for his removal on Saturday and blamed him
and his entourage for the crisis. Business “oligarchs” also distanced
themselves from a man long seen as their representative in the
presidency.
In a mark of passions dividing
Ukrainians along a historic faultline between Russian and Ukrainian
cultures, local television in Kerch, in eastern Crimea, showed a crowd
hauling down the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag in front of the town
hall and hoisting the white, blue and red Russian tricolour.
In a hectic round of voting in
parliament, lawmakers rushed in some crowd-pleasing measures against the
old administration, conscious that those still occupying Independence
Square - or the Maidan - remain deeply suspicious of the political
class.
They stripped Yanukovich of his
abandoned country home near Kiev, complete with ostrich farm and hot
tubs, its brash opulence fuelling demands that he be held to account for
stealing taxpayer billions.
Turchinov said a government should be in place by Tuesday.
His
ally, Tymoshenko, defeated by Yanukovich in a 2010 presidential election
and later jailed for corruption, ruled herself out as interim premier.
Freed from a prison hospital on Saturday after more than two years in
jail, she may want time to recover and build support before running for
the presidency.
As prime minister following the
largely peaceful Orange Revolution of 2004-05, which overturned a first
presidential victory by Yanukovich, Tymoshenko disappointed many in
Ukraine who had hoped for an end to the corruption and failed economic
policies that marked the aftermath of Soviet communism.
“In these days the most important
thing is to form a functioning government,” said Vitaly Klitschko, a
former world boxing champion and also a possible presidential contender.
On Independence Square, men were
still wandering around with clubs and wearing home-made body armour,
helmets and in some cases ski masks and camouflage fatigues.
“We'll stay here to the very end,”
said one, Bohdan Zakharchenko, 23, from Cherkasy, south of Kiev. “We
will be here till there's a new president.” - Reuters
end quote from:
When I saw a guy on TV swinging a traditional axe and wanting Yanukovich's head I sort of knew this guy was in trouble. When people only demonstrating starting dying from snipers this government was over.
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