With President’s Departure, Ukraine Looks Toward a Murky Future

The New York Times

By Andrew Higgins

As ranks of riot police officers, Interior Ministry troops and even the president vanished Saturday from the capital, Ukraine slipped, with often-eerie calm after months of tumultuous protests and a week of bloody mayhem, into the hands of revolution.

Gone along with President Viktor F. Yanukovych, who had fled to eastern Ukraine, was any trace of a Friday peace deal that had sought to freeze the country’s tumult by trimming the powers of the president while allowing him to stay in office until the end of the year.

At the president’s mist-shrouded residential compound just outside the capital in Mezhgorye, Sergey Belaus, a major in Ukraine’s State Protection service, said he had handed over control of Mr. Yanukovych’s living quarters and his tennis court to the head of a small band of antigovernment militants at 9 a.m.

“He came. We talked, and we agreed that he would now be in charge,” said Mr. Belaus, recounting that helicopters and cars had fled the compound, on a bluff overlooking the Dnieper River, overnight. He said he did not know where Mr. Yanukovych had gone.

Also unknown is what now fills the vacuum left by Mr. Yanukovych’s departure: perhaps an orderly new leadership headed by established opposition parties, perhaps a chaotic cacophony of voices driven by the passions of the street or, most ominously of all, perhaps the establishment of two or more rival power centers pushing the fractured nation into a Yugoslav-style disintegration.

Fear of the establishment of rival power centers gained ground on Saturday when Mr. Yanukovych, having left the capital, popped up on television from Kharkiv, a Russian-speaking and strongly...