(22 Feb 2014) Hours after her release from prison, former Ukrainian prime minister and opposition icon Yulia Tymoshenko appeared before an ecstatic crowd at the protester encampment in Ukraine's capital on Saturday night.
She praised the demonstrators killed in a deadly spike of violence this week and urged the protesters to keep occupying the square.
"This is a Ukraine of free people, and you have given this country to each and all of us, those who are living today and those who will live tomorrow," she said.
Her speech to the crowd of about 50,000, delivered from a wheelchair because of the severe back problems she suffered in two and a half years of imprisonment, was the latest stunning development in the fast-moving Ukrainian political crisis.
Only a day earlier, her arch-rival, President Viktor Yanukovych, signed an agreement with protest leaders that cut his powers and called for early elections.
Parliament, once controlled by Yanukovych supporters, quickly thereafter voted to decriminalise the abuse-of-office charge for which Tymoshenko was convicted.
Tymoshenko appeared close to exhaustion and her voice cracked frequently, but her flair for vivid words was undimmed.
"People who were on Maidan (Independence Square), who perished on Maidan are heroes for ever, they are our liberators," she said.
Yanukovych meanwhile appeared to be losing power by the hour.
He decamped from Kiev to Kharkiv, a city in his support base in eastern Ukraine, while protesters took control of the presidential administration building and thousands of curious and contemptuous Ukrainians roamed the suddenly open grounds of the lavish compound outside Kiev where he was believed to live.
In Kharkiv, Yanukovych defiantly declared that he regarded parliament's actions as invalid and bitterly likened the demonstrators who conducted three months of protests against him to Nazis.
The reversal of fortune for both Tymoshenko and Yanukovych was an eerie echo of the Orange Revolution of a decade ago - the mass protests that forced a rerun of a presidential election nominally won by Yanukovych.
The icon of 2004 and beyond made it clear to the gathered thousands that the struggle was far from over.
"Until you finish this mission, to the very end, to the last step, no-one has the right to demand you to move aside, because you have changed everything - not politicians or diplomats or the world community, no-one," she said.
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