Armed protesters have stormed police barricades in Kiev in renewed violence that has killed at least 26 people and shattered an hours-old truce.
Bodies of anti-government demonstrators lay amid smouldering debris on Thursday after masked protesters hurling Molotov cocktails and stones forced police from Kiev's iconic Independence Square - the focal point of the former Soviet country's three-month-old crisis.
The retreating police unleashed a hail of rubber bullets on protesters as plumes of smoke billowed into the air amid the explosions of stun grenades.
The lobby of the Ukraina hotel overlooking the square was turned into an impromptu morgue, with the bodies of seven dead protesters under white sheets in front of the reception desk.
An AFP photographer saw spent live cartridge shells littering the ground on the square. It was unclear who had used the ammunition.
The main government building nearby was evacuated while lawmakers ended a session of parliament early after the violence.
The country's three main opposition leaders put the blame for the fresh unrest on the authorities, calling it a "planned provocation".
The clashes shattered a truce that Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych had called late on Wednesday in response to a spurt of violence that killed more than two dozen people in less than two days.
Yanukovych was holding crisis talks with the foreign ministers of EU powers France and Germany along with Poland before an emergency meeting in Brussels at which the European Union was expected to impose sanctions against Ukrainian government officials for the unrest.
The US State Department had earlier announced slapping travel bans on about 20 senior Kiev government figures over fighting that killed at least 28 people on same central Kiev square on Tuesday night.
Reporters said they saw the bodies of at least 25 protesters with apparent gunshot wounds around two Independence Square hotels and lying outside the Kiev post office on Thursday.
Ukraine's interior ministry said one policeman died from gunshot wounds and 29 officers had been injured.
Ukraine's crisis was initially ignited by Yanukovych's shock decision in November to ditch an historic EU trade and political association agreement in favour of closer ties with Kiev's historic masters in the Kremlin.
But it has since evolved into a much broader anti-government movement that has swept through both the pro-Western west of the country as well as parts of its more Russified east and exposed the deep historical fault lines between the two.
