Weekend Economists (Heart) the 4th Estate February 22-24, 2014

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47. Ukraine Leader’s Flight Blocked as Opponents Take Power

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-22/ukraine-leader-s-flight-blocked-as-opponents-take-power.html

Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko returned to the political stage after leaving prison as Viktor Yanukovych was stopped from fleeing the country following the nation’s bloodiest week since World War II.

Ex-Premier Tymoshenko, who led the overturning of a 2004 Yanukovych election victory in the Orange Revolution, pledged to immediately return to politics, capping a day in which protesters took control of central Kiev and flooded into Yanukovych’s luxury estate. Border guards stopped Yanukovych’s plane from leaving the country in the eastern region of Donetsk after he was stripped of his presidency. He escaped detention.

“Today a dictatorship fell,” Tymoshenko, looking frail as she spoke from a wheelchair after being released from a prison hospital, told protesters on Kiev’s Independence Square. “A new epoch has started -- an epoch of free people, of a free European Ukraine.”

With Yanukovych denouncing events from eastern Ukraine as a “coup d’etat,” opposition parties must quickly establish a new government and shore up an economy in need of outside financial aid. Facing public anger in Kiev and western Ukraine at Yanukovych’s decision last year to pull out of a trade deal with the European Union, they may encounter political wrangling as Tymoshenko’s return complicates plans to share power ahead of an early presidential election scheduled for May 25.