Ukrainian authorities yesterday provisionally freed the last 234 detained protesters under an amnesty offer aimed at defusing protracted street unrest, but activists decried the move as a sham and pressed for further concessions.
President Viktor Yanukovych’s government has fixed Monday as the deadline for all occupied municipal buildings to be cleared of protesters and barricades to be removed from city centre roads in the capital Kiev in exchange for the release of the detainees and a possible future pardon.
Yanukovych negotiated the amnesty offer through Parliament to try to take the sting out of street protests in Kiev and elsewhere in Ukraine that have kept him on the back foot since he spurned a trade pact with the European Union in November.
With much of downtown Kiev a fortified camp where hundreds of “Euro-maidan” activists keep up protests behind barricades and sandbags, Yanukovych wants to tamp down tension before he picks a new prime minister, possibly as early as next week.
But with protesters highly suspicious about virtually any offer from Yanukovych’s side, there seemed little chance of them relinquishing control of the streets by next week, though they said late yesterday they might allow traffic to pass on the main road leading to government headquarters.
Though police released the last of 234 detained protesters yesterday, criminal charges have not been lifted against them.
They face prosecution at some point in the future for participating in “mass disorder” – a charge carrying a sentence of several years in prison – unless their comrades leave occupied buildings and clear blocked roads.
General prosecutor Viktor Pshonka yesterday said authorities would immediately begin considering dropping charges if buildings were cleared and key roads in the capital re-opened by Monday. But opposition parties and radical protesters, who clashed violently with police last month, said they wanted all charges dropped immediately.
“We have people being released from jail but kept under house arrest, that is to say they are deprived of their rights, and there is a criminal case hanging over each one of them. This is not an amnesty.
“This does not meet the conditions of the opposition,” Rostislav Pavlenko, a member of opposition leader Vitaly Klitschko’s party, Udar (Punch), was quoted as saying by the Russian news agency Interfax.
At least six people have been killed in clashes with riot police – unprecedented in the 22 years since Ukraine gained independence – since thousands of protesters rebelled against Yanukovych’s sudden move to snub the EU in favour of forging closer economic ties with former Soviet master Russia.