Kiev: A few thousand protesters clashed with police on Tuesday outside the Ukrainian parliament, throwing stones and smoke bombs and firing with air guns through the building's windows.
A Reuters photographer said that the mainly young people, many of whom were masked and armed with batons or metal chains, massed outside the central entrance of the building and began bombarding it with projectiles.
Parliamentary deputies, who had just passed anti-corruption laws and voted in a new defense minister in what was the last day of the current parliament ahead of an Oct. 26 election, went into recess because of the disorder outside.
It was not immediately clear what the demands of the protesters were. Several of them declined to say what political forces they represented.
"This is a provocative action directed on detribalization of the situation in Ukraine," said Zoryan Shkiryak, aid for Ukrainian interior minister. Most windows on the first floor were broken or shot out by air guns which some of the protesters possessed, the photographer said.
Earlier on Tuesday the nationalist Svoboda party held a meeting near parliament urging deputies to give special status to a World War Two nationalist force called the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) which fought both the Nazi occupation and later Soviet forces.
But Svoboda said its members had no link with the protesters. The far-right nationalist group Right Sector also said its people had not taken part.
