KYIV, UKRAINE—For days and for months — or, as some argue, forever, really — Viktor Yanukovych had his finger on the pulse of the past.

Overestimating his position, underestimating his opposition, day upon day misreading Ukraine’s spiralling anger. Answering today’s news with yesterday’s solution.

Last Thursday he played Wednesday’s card, unleashing game-changing carnage in the heart of Kyiv. And then Friday, under withering pressure from EU mediators, the ashen-faced president began at last to catch up.

Too late. An 11th-hour agreement to step down at a future date went nowhere. The trap door opened beneath Yanukovych with the collapse of his fleeing security teams, leaving Ukraine’s leader with one last, lonely choice — go now, quickly, or be a goner.

But give Yanukovych this, at least: he is much faster on his feet as a fugitive than he ever was as president.

As he approaches day four on the run, Yanukovych’s vanishing act seems almost Saddamesque. Reporters, and now, Ukrainian special forces carrying a warrant for his arrest for “the mass murder of peaceful citizens” in Kyiv, are mobilizing to the east and south — the Russian-leaning cities of Kharkiv and Donetsk, and to the peninsula of Crimea, home to Vladimir Putin’s Black Sea fleet.

False rumours flow by the hour, describing Yanukovych’s artful dodge. One account has him holed up in a monastery with 1,000 loyalists. Another has him poised to sail his personal yacht to Mother Russia, perhaps even to Sochi now that the Olympic glare has faded to black. Another still says he is dead, killed by foreign assassins.

On Monday, Ukraine’s acting Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, tipped the scales toward Crimea, the most intensely Russian part of Ukraine. Posting on Facebook, Avakov detailed Yanukovych’s flight path as follows — a helicopter getaway from Kyiv to Kharkiv and then another to Donestsk, where he and his entourage twice attempted to board private jets out of the country.

Denied permission to fly, Avakov said Yanukovych then travelled by motorcade to a private Crimean villa. By midnight Sunday, he was on the move again, climbing into a car with his last remaining bodyguards in the Black Sea port of Balaclava.

As his options evaporate, so, too, do his allies. The Party of Regions that he led has suffered a meltdown of its own, with mass resignations, many accompanied by self-preserving denunciations of Yanukovych’s rule.

The assumption that Putin will provide safe harbour for his longtime ally is also in doubt in the wake of a blistering attack on Yanukovych by a prominent Russian state TV host, who on Sunday accused Yanukovych of betraying his people by fleeing Kyiv.

Yet with or without Yanukovych, few doubt Putin will sit idly by as Ukraine sheds its pro-Russian leadership. The most ominous signal came Monday in a statement from Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who all but wrote off Ukraine’s new government as armed mutineers “in black masks and Kalashnikov rifles.

“Strictly speaking, today there is no one to talk to there. The legitimacy of a whole host of government bodies is raising huge doubts,” Medvedev said.

“If people crossing Kyiv in black masks and Kalashnikov rifles are considered a government, it will be difficult for us to work with such a government,” he said.

The western embrace of the new Ukrainian leadership, he said, “is an aberration of perception when something that is essentially the result of a mutiny is called legitimate.”

Though a fragile calm held in the capital, resistance to the dramatic ouster of Moscow’s staunchest ally was especially apparent in Crimea.

One video posted online purported to show the arrival in Sevastopol of a busload of Ukrainian riot police, or Berkut, direct from the front lines in Kyiv, where 78 unarmed protesters were killed Thursday.

The video shows a crowd heaping praise upon the incoming police team, chanting (in Russian), “Honours to Berkut,” “You are the men,” “We love you” and “You should have killed more.”

The widely circulated clip played directly into fears of new fault lines putting Ukraine’s territorial integrity at risk.

But on the still-crowded Independence Square in Kyiv, epicentre of the revolution, not everyone was prepared to believe their ears.

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“Perhaps it is real, perhaps it is artificial, designed to frighten us and create problems that don’t need to be,” said Ihor Perepast, who stood vigil with his wife Svetlana Monday night as a testament to bicultural coexistence. He is Ukrainian, she of Russian ancestry.

“Look at us — a Ukrainian-Russian marriage, and just one of many. And here we are in the Maidan, standing strong,” said Svetlana.

“It’s the same as Canadians and Americans. Some of you don’t like each other, but you don’t have a war about it. The problem isn’t Russia. We love Russia. The problem is Yanukovych and Putin. One of them is gone. Now we wait and hope the other will leave us alone.”

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