KIEV / BERLIN - Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych on Friday signed a law offering an amnesty to jailed opposition activists and repealed controversial laws cracking down on protests, his office said.
The amnesty bill passed by parliament on Wednesday gives protesters a 15-day deadline to vacate the public buildings they have occupied in order for it to be implemented.
Under the law, protesters will have to vacate the flashpoint Grushevsky Street in the capital Kiev, where several activists were shot dead during bitter clashes with security forces during a recent outbreak of violence. They will also have to leave streets and squares they have been occupying "except those where peaceful protest actions are taking place". This opens the possibility that protesters could be allowed to stay at their tent city on Kiev's Independence Square.
The amnesty law was backed by Yanukovych's Regions Party and passed in a chaotic late-night session.
Opposition lawmakers did not vote for the amnesty law, stressing that it would mean the jailed protesters were effectively being held hostage until the buildings were freed.
Yanukovych, who on Thursday went on indefinite sick leave, also signed legislation scrapping draconian anti-protest laws passed earlier this month which radicalised the two-month protest movement.
The laws had made the occupation of public buildings punishable by up to five years in prison, outlawed protest convoys of more than five cars and imposed a ban on protesters wearing masks or helmets.
The measures seen as a concession to the protest movement are unlikely to placate opposition leaders, who are gearing up to meet US Secretary of State John Kerry and other senior foreign officials in Germany this weekend. The nation is facing its worse crisis since its 1991 independence.
Opposition supporters are digging in at their protest camp on Kiev's central square known as the Maidan despite a string of earlier concessions from the authorities, including Yanukovych's acceptance of his prime minister Mykola Azarov's resignation.
The Ukraine's military on Friday called on President Viktor Yanukovych to take "urgent steps" to ease turmoil in the country, weighing in for the first time on the ex-Soviet nation's worst crisis since independence.
The army's call on the embattled leader, who on Thursday took indefinite sick leave, came as protesters refused to leave occupied municipal buildings in Kiev and as the West prepared to receive opposition leaders at the weekend. It also came as a prominent opposition activist who went missing more than a week ago re-appeared bloodied and disfigured, saying he was tortured by unidentified assailants before being dumped in a forest in the freezing cold.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday that measures pledged by Ukraine's embattled leader to address protesters' demands did not go far enough.
"The offers... have not yet reached an adequate level of reform," he told reporters after talks in Berlin with his German counterpart, Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
He said that President Viktor Yanukovych needed to go beyond an amnesty law for jailed pro-EU opposition activists and the repeal of anti-protest laws -- steps the president ratified Friday despite being on indefinite sick leave. Kerry said if there were signs of real progress in including the opposition in power, the United States would then encourage the demonstrators to cooperate in the interest of "unity" and peace "because further violence and violence that gets out of control is not in anybody's interest." Kerry was in Berlin on his way to an international security conference in the southern city of Munich where he will meet, among others, key leaders of the Ukrainian opposition for the first time.