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Opposition protesters in Ukraine agreed this afternoon to a truce of several hours with police while talks took place between their leaders and President Viktor Yanukovich.
Protesters have been bombarding police with petrol bombs and cobblestones in capital Kiev since Sunday
But they agreed with opposition leader Vitaly Klitschko that they would suspend further action until 8pm after he went to protest barricades and appealed directly to them.
As the truce took effect the new talks started between Mr Yanukovich and an unholy alliance of the liberal Mr Klitschko, former economy minister Arseny Yatsenyuk and extreme right-wing nationalist Oleh Tyahnibok.
In talks on Wednesday, however, Mr Yanukovich refused to make any real concessions to the opposition leaders' demands.
He called a special parliamentary session for next week, but there has been no indication that this represents any inclination to compromise, since he has a comfortable majority in parliament.
Opposition leaders had set a deadline of this evening for Mr Yanukovych to make concessions or face renewed clashes.
Confrontations were sparked when President Yanukovich pulled out of signing a free trade deal with the European Union in favour of closer economic ties with Russia.
Resulting protests swelled into peaceful mass rallies against the four-year rule of Mr Yanukovich, but they turned violent on Sunday when extreme rightwingers broke away from the main protest area in Kiev and clashed with riot police.
Three protesters have been killed since Sunday - two of them from gunshot wounds - and more than 150 police have been injured in Kiev's worst street violence since WWII.
Two tortured bodies have also been found in a forest north-east of the city. One remains anonymous while the other has been identified as Yuriy Verbytskyi, a street activist abducted by unknown kidnappers from a Kiev hospital on Wednesday night.
Around 300 miles eastward in the city of Lviv, hundreds of protesters stormed into the regional governor's office and forced him to write a letter of resignation.
