Police, protesters wage \\\'war\\\' in deadly Kiev clashes, 25 kiled

KIEV, Feb 19 (AFP): Protesters braced Wednesday for a fresh assault by riot police in central Kiev after a day of clashes left at least 25 people dead in the worst violence since the start of Ukraine's three-month political crisis.
As dawn rose over Kiev's battered city centre, protesters hurled paving stones and Molotov cocktails at lines of riot police that had pushed into the heart of the devastated protest camp on Independence Square.
Overnight, security forces rained a volley of tear gas down on thousands of demonstrators as they ramped up attempts to clear the square where protesters have set up a sprawling tent city during three months of protests.
Swathes of the tent encampment have already been destroyed by fire and flames poured out of the windows of a gutted building on the square.
A wall of smoke and flames rose up into the dawn sky as the encampment continued to burn, while lines of police and protesters-both clutching shields and wearing helmets and body armour-faced off in an apocalyptic scene.
The surge in violence, in a country torn between a future allied to the West and to Russia, sparked alarm in Europe and the United States.
But a defiant President Viktor Yanukovych rejected calls to halt the ferocious assault on the bloodiest day since protests broke out in November, when he ditched a pact with the European Union in favour of closer ties with former master Russia.