Just after 2 p.m. on Dec. 1, as a peaceful demonstration was taking place on Independence Square blocks away, hundreds of radical demonstrators, many outfitted with armor and gas masks, marched on Bankova Street toward the Presidential Administration building. Some brought with them crowbars, chains, clubs and gas canisters. Stones, which they didn’t bring, they pulled up from the cobbled sidewalks. A man driving a front loader accompanied them. They were ready for battle.
The rowdy mob was met by a steel barricade and a wall
of heavily armored special riot police.
Tensions
escalated quickly when the rowdy group, chanting “Death to enemies!” “Convict out!” “Bandits out!” attempted to break through police barricades using the
front loader. Police responded with flash grenades and tear gas, eventually
pushing protesters back.
Within
minutes, hundreds more arrived on the scene. Police reformed and prepared for
the next attempt, which proved again to be unsuccessful. Meanwhile, the crowd
continued to grow.
With tensions reaching a boiling point, parliamentarian
and businessman Petro Poroshenko jumped in to calm the crowd. Speaking through
a megaphone atop the bulldozer, he said that opposition leaders did not want to
storm the building and that paid provocateurs had been sent here especially to
fight with police.
“There are 1,500 titushki (hired thugs) who are armed and
are here as provocateurs,” he said. Some responded to his words by throwing
candy at him, a jab to his owning the country’s largest confectionery, Roshen. He
asked that protesters rejoin the peaceful demonstration on Independence Square.
At the same time world boxing champion and leader of the
opposition UDAR party Vitaly Klitschko, who was in a different part of the city
but following developments on Bankova, condemned the attempt to storm the
president’s office and denounced it as an effort to provoke the government into
declaring a state of emergency.
But their
messages fell on the deaf ears of men who’d come with one purpose in mind: to
take over the President Yanukovych’s office.
Slava, a young man who
carried a can of pepper spray and said he did not want to give his last name
for fear of repercussions, said that the group was determined to get inside. “We
will take it. He (Yanukovych) is a criminal and traitor,” he said.
Around 4 p.m.
protesters and police forces exchanged blows. Stun grenades flashed all around
and successively, tear gas filled the street and those who weren’t wearing
protective masks retreated to Institutka Street some 100 meters back. In the
calm between clashes, a protester walked through the crowd holding up a helmet with
a broken visor that he had seized, inciting loud cheers from the others. It
continued like this for nearly an hour before police finally – indiscriminately
and brutally – were able to disperse the demonstrators.
Even as they fled,
police chased down and beat protesters, including those not involved in the
attacks on police. Video filmed by Channel 5 shows numerous members of the special
police force beating with batons the protesters, some of which had already been
knocked down.
In all, dozens of people were carried to a nearby
makeshift medical center with scrapes and chemical burns while those with more
serious injuries were taken away by ambulance. The Kyiv Post witnessed at least
three protesters with bloody head wounds and many more gasping for breath on
the street between gas attacks by police.
The Kyiv Post also suffered
from the gas attacks but received help from volunteer medics standing nearby.
According to media reports, at least 30
journalists were wounded in the clashes, including a Euronews reporter whose
camera was also broken by police.
Kyiv Post editor Christopher J. Miller can be reached at [email protected], or on Twitter at @ChristopherJM.
