The withdrawal of riot police from two areas in Ukraine’s capital is raising opposition hopes that three weeks of escalating protests have begun to erode police support for President Viktor Yanukovych and his government.

Ukraine’s president has pardoned a former interior minister and a close ally of imprisoned former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko.

UKRAINE has not experienced the kind of intense political dramas seen in Russia and some of the other former Soviet states in the last 15 years, but now its turn may have come.