KIEV (AFP) - Ukraine is on the brink of "civil war" due to the standoff between the authorities and protesters across the country, its first post-independence president Leonid Kravchuk told parliament on Wednesday.
"All the world acknowledges and Ukraine acknowledges that the state is on the verge of civil war," Kravchuk, Ukraine's president from 1991-1994, told parliament in an emotional address. "It is a revolution. It is a dramatic situation in which we much act with the greatest responsibility," he told deputies, who gave him a standing ovation.