NEW YORK TIMES: …The attack on the square began shortly before 8 p.m., when police officers tried to drive two armored personnel carriers through stone-reinforced barriers outside the Khreshchatyk Hotel on the road to the square. The vehicles became bogged down and, set upon by protesters wielding rocks and fireworks, burst into flames, trapping the security officers inside one of them and prompting desperate rescue efforts to save those caught in the second vehicle, which managed to pull back from the protesters’ barricade…
Outside of the capital, protesters had again reportedly stormed provincial administrative buildings. Witnesses posting on social networks from western Ukraine, a redoubt of support for the opposition, said that demonstrators who had been protesting outside an Interior Ministry garrison in the region of Lviv had seized the site overnight Tuesday and captured its armory…
[President Viktor F. Yanukovych] had repeatedly pledged not to use force to disperse protesters, but after meeting President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia at the opening of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, he had clearly changed his mind. The fighting also broke out only a day after Russia threw a new financial lifeline to Mr. Yanukovych’s government by buying $2 billion in Ukrainian government bonds… (more)
