I arrived in Lviv at 6.30 a.m. The city welcomed me with snowfalls. Oksana Prokhorets was late due to snow and ice on the roads. We went to her house and ate breakfast. The day passed very quickly. Despite the bad weather, there are many pro-European protesters and they are highly active. The majority are students and Svoboda supporters.
Ukrainians have already collected 500,000 hryvnas for public television. I think Channel Five and TVI may well be banned from broadcasting in the next few days.
Yanukovych, we have learned, does not want to come home. He has landed, not in Kiev, but in Sochi, where he is drinking tea with Putin. We have no information about the results of his trip to China, only rumours. For example, it is said that he agreed to lease land in the south of Ukraine to the Chinese. But those rumours have been circulating for a year already, with others claiming he had signed an agreement for the immigration of several tens of thousands of Chinese people into Crimea.
In the evening, the news is given that even after Sochi, Yanukovych is not returning to Kiev, but will fly to Malta for an official visit. Later we learn that the Maltese government has refused to receive him, so he has no choice but to head home. More than three hundred cars driven by protesters go to Boryspil airport to welcome him back.