Yanukovych's regime appeared close to collapse as protesters took control of his offices and lawmakers voted to immediately free jailed pro-Western opposition icon Yulia Tymoshenko.
But Yanukovych defiantly told a local television station in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv -- a pro-Russian bedrock of support -- that he would fight tooth and nail against the "bandits" trying to oust him.
"I am not leaving the country for anywhere. I do not intend to resign. I am the legitimately elected president," the 63-year-old leader said in a firm voice.
"This is not an opposition," Yanukovych scoffed. "These are bandits."
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Yet a sense of an emerging power vacuum gripped the charred heart of the capital a day after Yanukovych and his political rivals signed a Western-brokered peace deal to end the ex-Soviet nation's worst crisis since independence from Moscow in 1991.
Key government buildings were left without police protection and baton-armed protesters dressed in military fatigues wandered freely across the president's once-fortified compound.
"We have taken the perimeter of the president's residence under our control for security reasons," Mykola Velichkovich of the opposition's self-declared Independence Square defence unit told AFP.