Update | Ukraine leader's sick leave prompts guessing game
Parliament in Kiev offers conditional amnesty to anti-government activists, who vow to continue street protests
Amid the deepest turmoil since the Orange Revolution, Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych’s announcement Thursday that he was taking indefinite sick leave prompted a guessing game among Ukrainians about what was happening to their country.
Debate raged on whether he was just sick or whether he was leaving the limelight in preparation for something, possibly either cracking down or stepping down.
Yanukovych has faced two months of major protests that sometimes paralyse central Kiev and have spread to other cities. The protests started after he backed out of a long-awaited agreement to deepen ties with the European Union in favour of Russia, but quickly came to encompass a wide array of discontent over corruption, heavy-handed police and dubious courts.
The official line is that the 63-year-old Yanukovych has an acute respiratory illness and a high fever.
But the opposition isn’t buying it. Some say he is looking for an excuse to avoid further discussions with opposition leaders, which have done nothing to resolve the tensions.
Vitali Klitschko, a leading opposition figure, has a more ominous theory — the president could be pretending to take himself out of action in preparation for imposing a state of emergency. That has been a persistent worry of the opposition since violent clashes two weeks ago killed three protesters.