Police battle protesters demanding resignation of Ukrainian leader

MOSCOW - Tens of thousands of demonstrators hurled stones and bottles at riot police in Kiev yesterday as the campaign to force the Ukrainian president, Leonid Kuchma, from office stepped up sharply.

The riot started when several hundred demonstrators tried to stop Mr Kuchma, whom they accuse of involvement in the murder of a journalist, laying a wreath at a monument to Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine's most famous poet.

Protesters from nationalist parties and the "Ukraine without Kuchma" movement charged the police in two columns.

Police officers with helmets and metal shields hit demonstrators with batons, injuring several. One protester was seriously injured after being beaten about the head.

After Mr Kuchma left the monument, the crowd surged forward and trampled on the wreath. Taras Chornovil, an opposition leader, called it "a symbolic cleaning of the monument".

Protesters – their numbers swelling to at least 18,000 – then marched to the presidential administration calling for Mr Kuchma to step down and those arrested earlier in the day be freed.

"Join us! Join us and get rid of Kuchma's criminal regime!" shoutedYevhen Zhovtyak, a leader of the nationalist Rukh party, as he marched at the head of the crowd.

In a second, more serious, clash at the presidential building, protesters apparently led by members of an extreme nationalist party, Una-Unso, hurled bottles, stones and metal crowd-control barriers as police fired tear gas from behind shields.

"No one expected that people would be beaten," said Yuri Lutsenko, one of the protest's organisers. "We did everything to avoid bloodshed."