IF DIALOGUE FAILS

While US President Obama said he believed a peaceful resolution was still possible, Poland's prime minister, Donald Tusk, spelled out the alternatives if dialogue fails.

"What if no compromise is achieved?" he asked in parliament. "We will have anarchy and perhaps division of the state or civil war, the beginning of which we may now be witnessing."

Protesters have been occupying central Kiev for almost three months since Yanukovich spurned a far-reaching trade deal with the EU and accepted a $15-billion Russian bailout instead.

After night fell, fires blazed along the barricaded frontline between the protesters and riot police, but there was no immediate sign of a repetition of Tuesday's violence.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Yanukovich spoke by telephone during the night and both denounced the events as an coup attempt, a Kremlin spokesman said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov blamed the West for encouraging opposition radicals "to act outside of the law".

Moscow announced on Monday it would resume stalled aid to Kiev, pledging $2 billion hours before the crackdown began. The money has not yet arrived and a Ukrainian government source said it had been delayed till Friday "for technical reasons".

Ukraine's hryvnia currency, flirting with its lowest levels since the global crash five years ago, weakened to more than 9 to the dollar for the second time this month.

BATTLE ZONE

After a night of petrol bombs and gunfire on Independence Square, a trade union building that protest organisers had used as a headquarters stood blackened and gutted by fire.

Security forces occupied about a third of the square - the part that lies closest to government offices and parliament - while protesters reinforced their defences on the remainder of a plaza they have dubbed "Euro-Maidan".

In a statement posted online in the early hours, Yanukovich said he had refrained from using force during three months of unrest but was being pressed by "advisers" to take a harder line: "Without any mandate from the people, illegally and in breach of the constitution of Ukraine, these politicians - if I may use that term - have resorted to pogroms, arson and murder to try to seize power," the president said.

He declared Thursday a day of mourning for the dead. The state security service said it had opened an investigation into illegal attempts by "individual politicians" to seize power.

One opposition leader, former world champion boxer Vitaly Klitschko, walked out of an overnight meeting with Yanukovich, saying he could not negotiate while blood was being spilt.

When fighting subsided at dawn, the square resembled a battle-zone, the ground charred by Molotov cocktails. Helmeted young activists used pickaxes, and elderly women their bare hands, to dig up paving to stock as ammunition.

The Health Ministry said 26 people were killed in fighting in the capital, of whom 10 were police officers. A ministry official said 263 protesters were being treated for injuries and 342 police officers, mainly with gunshot wounds.

The interior ministry said five of the dead policemen were hit by sniper fire in the head or neck. Journalists saw some hardline protesters carrying guns at the barricades.

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