Ukraine sets voting, ousts its president

KIEV, Ukraine - Ukrainian lawmakers voted Saturday to hold elections May 25 and to remove President Viktor Yanukovych, who vowed not to resign and was stopped by border officials as he attempted to flee the country.

As protesters took control of central Kiev, Yanukovych - from an undisclosed location - gave an interview to UBR television in which he called Saturday’s events a “coup d’etat.”

Meanwhile, former Premier Yulia Tymoshenko was freed from prison and announced to a cheering crowd her bid for the presidency, and Russia said Ukraine’s opposition was threatening the nation’s sovereignty and order.

The nation’s parliament approved a motion to remove Yanukovych 328-0 in the 450-seat chamber.

In downtown Kiev, where clashes last week killed at least 80 people, activists were unopposed by police. Ukraine’s army and Interior Ministry said they wouldn’t get involved in the protests, and customs officials stopped the president’s plane from leaving the country in the eastern Donetsk region, news service Interfax reported.

The political crisis in the nation of 46 million, strategically important for Europe, Russia and the United States, has changed rapidly in the past week. First there were signs that tensions were easing, followed by horrifying violence and then a deal signed under Western pressure that aimed to resolve the conflict but left the unity of the country in question.

On Saturday, before Tymoshenko’s arrival, an opposition figure hailed Yanukovych’s deteriorating hold on the country.

“The people have won, because we fought for our future,” said opposition leader Vitali Klitschko to a crowd of thousands on Independence Square. In a cold, heavy rain, protesters who have worked for weeks and months to pressure the president to leave congratulated themselves and shouted “Glory to Ukraine!”

“It is only the beginning of the battle,” Klitschko said, urging calm and telling protesters not to take justice into their own hands.

Meanwhile, Tymoshenko, whose stirring rhetoric attracted world attention in the 2004 Orange Revolution, appeared both sad and excited as she spoke to about 50,000 on Kiev’s Independence Square.

“Today a dictatorship fell,” she said. “A new epoch has started - an epoch of free people, of a free European Ukraine.”

She praised the protesters who were killed last week in police clashes that included sniper fire, and she entreated supporters to keep the camp going.“You are heroes, you are the best thing in Ukraine,” she said of the victims.

Yanukovych left Friday for the eastern city of Kharkiv after signing a deal with the opposition to end the bloodiest episode of the country’s post-World War II history.

Yanukovych said in his television appearance Saturday that he plans to travel to the southeastern part of Ukraine to talk to his supporters. The southeast is the location of the Crimea, the historically Russian section of the country that is the site of a Russian naval base.

In the parliament, members of the opposition began laying the groundwork for a change in leadership, electing Oleksander Turchynov, an ally of Tymoshenko, as speaker.

They also replaced the head of the Interior Ministry, which is responsible for the security forces.

The peace agreement, unveiled Friday after all-night talks in Kiev with European Union foreign ministers, envisioned a national unity government within 10 days. Lawmakers approved a return to the 2004 constitution, which would curb Yanukovych’s authority, and voted to free Tymoshenko.

After leaving a hospital where she was under guard, she made her way to the protesters’ camp in Kiev.

“Ukraine is now a free Ukraine,” Tymoshenko said. She urged protesters to stay in the square, or Maidan, which was also the epicenter of the 2004 Orange Revolution. “We are obliged to bring Yanukovych back to Maidan,” she said.

Lawmakers also passed measures to bring those behind the violence to justice. After his plane was grounded, Yanukovych left the airport in a car and didn’t appear at another border crossing, Interfax reported, citing Serhiy Astakhov, aide to the head of the State Customs Service. Former Interior Minister Vitaliy Zakharchenko, a minister under Yanukovych, was also caught trying to flee, Interfax reported Saturday, citing customs officials.

In Kiev’s northern outskirts, thousands of Ukrainians converged on Yanukovych’s residence. Hundreds of cars thronged the entrance, while people rode bikes and carried children around the compound. Previously closed to visitors, it boasted a man made lake as large as several football fields with a galleon and a zoo with deer, ostriches, peacocks and other animals.

An opposition unit took control of the presidential palace Saturday.

Members of an opposition group from Lviv called the 31st Hundred - carrying clubs and some of them wearing masks - were in control of the entryways to the palace Saturday morning.

Activists prevented people from entering the mansion. They recovered reams of paper documents that had been thrown into the pond and dried them in a building full of boats and a miniature hovercraft, according to images shown on Hromadske TV.

There was no sign of looting, either in the city or in the presidential compound.

In central Kiev, hundreds of people marched in processions bearing the coffins of activists killed in last week’s clashes, shouting ‘Glory!

Glory! Glory!” Marchers wept as the coffins were put in trucks to be taken for burial. Orthodox priests chanted prayers from the stage at the protesters’ tent encampment that has been the epicenter of the crisis.

“This man died for you,” Vitaly Kulakovsky, a 43-yearold supply manager, shouted, sobbing openly in front of a coffin. “It could have been me. Remember, he died for us, for our lives to be different.”

Protesters claimed to have established control over Kiev.

Nearby, thousands of protesters continued to re-enforce barricades and direct downtown traffic in the absence of police. Many families posed for pictures around barriers, burnt-out vehicles and a makeshift catapult that protesters designated as a future museum piece. Shops, including those of Diesel and United Benetton Group Spa, reopened after being closed during the violence.

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who helped negotiate the peace agreement signed by Yanukovych and the opposition, said there was “no coup in Kiev” and that the parliament is acting legally.

The president has 24 hours to sign constitutional changes adopted Friday into law, Sikorski said on Twitter. Yanukovych said he wouldn’t sign any acts recently passed by the parliament, which he deems illegal.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said the U.S. urged the prompt formation of a broad, technocratic government of national unity.

“We have consistently advocated a de-escalation of violence, constitutional change, a coalition government and early elections, and today’s developments could move us closer to that goal,” Carney said in a statement. “The unshakeable principle guiding events must be that the people of Ukraine determine their own future.”

The U.S. also welcomed Tymoshenko’s release from a prison hospital.

“We continue to urge an end to violence by all sides and a focus on peaceful, democratic dialogue, working pursuant to Ukraine’s constitution and through its institutions of government,” Carney said.

U.S. officials said President Vladimir Putin of Russia told President Barack Obama in a telephone call Friday that he would work toward resolving the crisis, but his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, did not sound as conciliatory.

In a telephone call, Lavrov told the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland, who helped mediate a short lived peace deal agreed to on Friday, that opposition leaders who signed the accord with Yanukovych had reneged on their commitments.

Secretary of State John Kerry and Lavrov agreed on the need to resolve the situation without violence when they spoke by phone Saturday afternoon, the State Department said in a statement.

Lavrov expressed his “gravest concern” about the opposition’s “inability to negotiate,” according to a statement on his ministry’s website.

The “opposition not only failed to fulfill any of its obligations but puts forth new requirements, following the lead of armed extremists and thugs whose actions pose a direct threat to the sovereignty and constitutional order in Ukraine,” Lavrov said, according to the statement.

The staff members of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, which is responsible for security forces, “stresses it is on the side of the Ukrainian nation,” according to a website statement. The military and the Defense Ministry said they would “remain faithful to the people.”

U.K. Foreign Secretary William Hague agreed with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier to support a new government in Ukraine and push for a “vital” International Monetary Fund financing package, the British official said in a Twitter post Saturday.

The Ukrainian crisis began Nov. 21, when Yanukovych rejected an EU integration pact and opted instead for $15 billion of Russian aid. Violence intensified last week in Kiev amid frustration among protesters that their demands for immediate elections and governance changes were being ignored.

Yanukovych will be given no assurances regarding his fate, said Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who heads Tymoshenko’s party. Klitschko, the former world boxing champion who heads the opposition UDAR party, said those responsible for the bloodshed over the protests will be held accountable.

The street fighting prompted EU governments to threaten sanctions on Ukrainian officials and send envoys to hammer out the peace deal. The crisis has taken its toll on the economy in Ukraine, whose gas pipelines are a key east-west transit route for energy. The country has endured three recessions since 2008.

Russia has halted the $15 billion bailout for its neighbor because of the unrest. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said Friday in an interview in Hong Kong that Russia has “many questions” on how Ukraine can repay the aid.

Information for this article was contributed by Kateryna Choursina, Daryna Krasnolutska, Ilya Arkhipov, Ian Wishart, Henry Meyer, Ksenia Galouchko, Nicole Gaouette, David McQuaid and Volodymyr Verbyany of Bloomberg News; by Angela Charlton, Jim Heintz, Maria Danilova,Yuras Karmanau,Vladimir Isachenkov and Darlene Superville of The Associated Press; and by Andrew Higgins, Andrew E. Kramer, David M. Herszenhorn, Iksana Lyachynska and Steven Lee Myers of The New York Times.