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Protesters in Kiev announce nationwide strike

"Our plan is clear: it is not a rally or action, it is a revolution," Leader of the Third Ukrainian Republic movement and former Ukrainian Interior Minister Yuri Lutsenko said

KIEV, December 01, (ITAR-TASS). Speaking to protesters who have gathered in Kiev’s central Independence Square, or Maidan Nezalezhnosti, leader of the nationalist party Svoboda (Liberty) and member of the Ukrainian parliament Olyag Tyagbinok announced a nationwide strike.

“We are beginning a nationwide strike,” he said. “Starting from this very minute, we are staying here, in Maidan Nezlazhnosti.”

Leader of the Third Ukrainian Republic movement and former Ukrainian Interior Minister Yuri Lutsenko said that mass protest actions had grown into a revolution. “Our plan is clear: it is not a rally or action, it is a revolution,” he said.

Ukrainian opposition activists in about 300 cars are trying to get to the presidential residence Mezhgorye in the settlement of Novye Petrovtsy outside Kiev.

They were stopped by four buses with Berkut riot police near Novye Petrovtsy. Opposition activists however say they are not going to change their plans.

About 100 policemen were hurt in clashed with protesters in front of the building of the Ukrainian president’s administration in the centre of Kiev, the press service of the Kiev police department said.

“The policemen were hospitalized with various bodily injuries incurred by the protesters who used cocktail bombs and other objects,” the police said. “In line with the law on police, law enforcers used tear gas and flash bang grenades to stop riots.”

According to Petr Poroshenko, Ukraine’s former Foreign Minister and now a businessman and an opposition politician, about 500 young men “of the athletic build broke police cordons and imitated storming of the presidential administration” on Sunday. “They behaved aggressively: threw various objects, including stones and Molotov cocktails at the police.” Poroshenko said these people were provokers who had “nothing in common with the peaceful rally in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square).”