Image: Evgeny Feldman/Associated Press
KIEV, UKRAINE â€" After the bloodiest day in Ukraine's two-month-old uprising, protesters are gearing up for a long and potentially brutal fight with riot police. They packed bags full of fresh snow in front of barricades on Independence Square and duct taped thick magazines and pieces of plastics to their shins and forearms.
At least two protesters were shot and killed early Wednesday. A third reportedly fell to his death from atop a colonnade after police beat him with truncheons.
Protesters at the scene told Mashable they saw a sniper fire the shots from a nearby rooftop. One of the men took a bullet to the heart, according to Oleg Musiy, a medical services coordinator for the protest movement. The other man was shot in the head and neck up to four times, he said. It’s unclear whether the bullets were rubber or metal. However, Musiy said “it is impossible†for those wounds to have been caused by rubber bullets.
The government on Wednesday ordered the closure of businesses in central Kiev and sanctioned the use of new gas and weapons against protesters.
The violence kicked off just before sunrise when masked protesters hurled Molotov cocktails and stones at police, who, in turn, heaved flash grenades and tear gas at protesters and fired rubber bullets indiscriminately into a crowd of about 300.
Opposition politicians and civil society leaders immediately called for a general mobilization. Within an hour, thousands of protesters took to the city’s central streets. At least 1,000 came up against riot police near the cabinet building before police forcibly drove them back to Independence Square, the epicenter of the "Euromaidan" protests, as they are called.
For the next several hours, police and protesters pushed each other up and down Hrushevskoho Street. Several dozen men burned tires in the roadway to block the visibility of police forces. For much of the afternoon thick, black smoke filled the area, accompanied by bursts of shotgun fire from police.
Violence between the two groups has escalated in recent days, but Wednesday's events were no doubt the most violent and worrisome since protests began in November.
The country's three largest political opposition parties, Arseniy Yatseniuk's Batkivshchyna Party, Vitali Klitschko's Ukrainian Democratic Alliance For Reform and Oleh Tiahnybok's Svoboda Party, expressed outrage over the fatal shootings of the two demonstrators.
"Four gunshot wounds to the head and neck in one of the dead is not self-defense [by police] who deliberately shot civilians. The direct responsibility for this act of terror against the citizens of dictatorship lies heavily on the interior minister â€" the bloody killer Vitaliy Zakharchenko," the three opposition parties said in a joint statement.
Ukrainian officials denied their involvement in the protesters' deaths. In a speech to his cabinet, Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov took a hard line against the protests, according to Reuters, and seemed to suggest a further crackdown.
“Terrorists from the 'Maidan' seized dozens of people and beat them,†he said. “I am officially stating that these are criminals who must answer for their action."
The United States began targeted sanctions in the form revoked visas of top Ukrainian officials they believe ordered police violence against protesters in November and December.
Because of U.S. confidentiality laws, the names of the officials who had their visas revoked would not be released publicly.
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