Ukraina valde Ryssland före EU - stora protester som följd, länkar i inlägg2

As the center of the Ukrainian capital tipped into a maelstrom of gunfire and blood on Thursday, a man wearing a helmet stood on a street corner near Independence Square, the epicenter of the violence, holding a leaf of printer paper.

“Guys,” he called out, “we are forming a new hundred. Please sign up.”

Anton Chontorog, 23, a computer programmer, joined a small crowd of young men who lined up to enroll in the hundred, the basic organizing unit of a strikingly resilient force that is providing the tip of the spear in the violent showdown with government security forces. The sotni, as the units are called, take their name from a traditional form of Cossack cavalry division. Activists estimate at least 32 such groups are in Kiev now, with more forming all the time.

Mr. Chontorog said that he had been in the square many times as a protester, but that after the violence on Thursday wanted to commit himself to the fight, which meant following orders from the commander of his hundred. “A volunteer just shows up to help,” he said. “The difference is that a member of a hundred has obligations.”

Across Kiev and beyond, personal barriers that once defined the limits of behavior are crumbling, pushing this fractured but, until a few weeks ago, proudly peaceful nation into a spiral of chaos.

The Ukrainian authorities and their allies in the Kremlin identify the source of the increase in violence as extremists and terrorists, the young militants of sometimes sinister, far-right political affiliations with ideologies formed in the struggle against Polish and Soviet domination. They have provided much of the front-line muscle in increasingly bloody clashes with the police.

But there are thousands of other protesters who, like Mr. Chontorog, are late converts to militancy, who say they believe that the government has left them with no other choice by deploying so much lethal violence itself.

As footage from an extraordinary parliament session was beamed to the big screen on the Maidan, as Independence Square is known, huge cheers went up as resolutions were passed to return to the country's 2004 constitution, fire the unpopular interior minister, and free the jailed former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko.

But there was also scepticism about the deal that three EU foreign ministers brokered between the political opposition and President Viktor Yanukovych, in an attempt to end the three-month stand-off between protesters and the government that turned so violent this week. For all the concessions, there was also anger that under the deal, Yanukovych could remain president until the end of the year.

Among the hardcore manning the huge barricades around the protest encampment that centres on the Maidan and sprawls into surrounding streets, nobody was planning to pack up and go home.

"What kind of compromise can there be with a man who has feasted on the blood of his own citizens," asked Volodymyr, a 34-year-old in a balaclava and motorcycle helmet, wielding an axe and guarding one of the barricades at Institutska Street, scene of the worst violence earlier in the week. "The only thing we should be negotiating about is how we kill him."