Member Since: 3/27/2010
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Ukraine Clash: up to 100 dead on Thursday
Ukraine’s Forces Escalate Attacks Against Protesters
Quote:
Security forces fired on masses of antigovernment demonstrators in Kiev on Thursday in a drastic escalation of the three-month-old crisis that left dozens dead and Ukraine reeling from the most lethal day of violence since Soviet times.
The shootings followed a quickly shattered truce, with enraged protesters parading dozens of captured police officers through Kiev’s central square. Despite a frenzy of East-West diplomacy and negotiations, there was little sign that tensions were easing.
The sights of bullet-riddled bodies slumped amid smoldering debris, some of them shot in the head, and screaming medics carrying the dead and wounded to emergency clinics, including one in a hotel lobby, shocked the country and the world. The opposition said that at least 70 and as many as 100 people had been killed, while municipal authorities put the day’s death toll at 39.
War had basically broken out, with the police having been authorized to use live ammunition. Just after dawn, young men in ski masks opened a breach in the police barricade near the stage on Independence Square, ran across a hundred yards of smoldering debris from what had been called a protective ring of fire and confronted riot police officers who were firing at them with shotguns. Snipers also opened fire, but it was unclear which side they were on.
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