At least 26 people have been killed as fresh violence erupted in Kiev today - ending a day-old truce.
Police have been shooting protestors - who are retaliating with petrol bombs and other missiles.
EU Foreign Ministers are meeting in Brussels this afternoon to discuss possible sanctions on Ukraine.
Juliette Gash reports;
Ukraine's day-old truce shattered this morning in fierce clashes between baton-wielding protesters and riot police that claimed at least 26 lives.
Bodies of anti-government demonstrators lay amid smouldering debris after masked protesters hurling Molotov cocktails and stones forced armed police from Kiev's iconic Independence Square - the epicentre of the ex-Soviet country's three-month-old crisis.
Ukraine's three main opposition leaders called the unrest a "planned provocation" by the pro-Russian government while Moscow blamed it on "extremists and hardliners" who they say are bent on sparking a civil war.
The clashes left in tatters a truce that Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych had called late Wednesday in response to a spurt of violence that killed more than two dozen people in less than two days.
Yanukovych is holding crisis talks with the foreign ministers of EU powers France and Germany along with Poland ahead of an emergency meeting in Brussels this afternoon where the European Union is expected to impose sanctions against Ukrainian government officials for the unrest.
- US and EU sanctions -
The crackdown by the authorities has triggered a storm of condemnation from the West and a new war of words with Moscow that carried the diplomatic echoes of the Cold War.
The US State Department announced it was imposing visa bans on about 20 senior Ukrainian officials "complicit in or responsible for ordering or otherwise directing human rights abuses".
Western pressure is set to mount still further when the European Union considers its own measures during a meeting in Brussels.
Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Eamon Gilmore is among those attending the emergency summit.
France said ahead of the meeting that sanctions would be prepared specifically against those responsible for the violence.
Moscow meanwhile has issued a string of outraged comments condemning both the protesters and the West.
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told Russia's cabinet that Moscow intended to follow through on its commitment to issue the next tranche of a $15 billion bailout that Putin and Yanukovych agreed shortly after Kiev rejected the EU pact.
But Medvedev said Moscow needs "partners who are in good shape and for the authorities that work in Ukraine to be legitimate and effective."
Politics even cast a shadowed over the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi when a Ukrainian alpine skier and her coach pulled out of competition in protest at the authorities' use of force.
