Police move against Kiev protesters

KIEV: Ukrainian security forces yesterday moved in on pro-EU demonstrators to end a week-long blockade of the government headquarters after the authorities sent special internal troops into central Kiev in an increasingly tense showdown.
With the authorities apparently keen to regain control of the city centre, the party of jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko said that armed police had raided their offices although this was denied by police. Upping the stakes after more than a fortnight of protests over the government's rejection of a pact with the European Union, the protesters a day earlier symbolically toppled the statue of the Soviet Union's founder Vladimir Lenin in Kiev.
President Viktor Yanukovych announced he would meet former Ukrainian presidents in a bid to find a way out of the crisis and was also backing the idea of roundtable talks with the opposition. 
With international concern growing about the risk of tensions degenerating into violence, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton was to travel to Kiev for talks with Yanukovych.
A column of special troops moved in on the protestors to force them to leave, upon which opposition MPs urged the demonstrators to move down the street to Independence Square, the main protest venue. 
Communal service workers — helped by police — then started dismantling the barricades the protesters had erected around the cabinet headquarters.AFP