From his speaker's chair in parliament, acting president Oleksander Turchinov referred to three deaths in two days in Donetsk and Kharkiv and said there was "a real danger" of invasion by Russian troops across Ukraine's eastern border.
Addressing members of the party of the pro-Moscow president who was ousted in last month's Kiev uprising, Mr Turchinov said: "You know as well as we do who is organising mass protests in eastern Ukraine - it is Kremlin agents who are organising and funding them, who are causing people to be murdered."
Two men, described by police as pro-Russian demonstrators, were rubbed out in a fight in Kharkiv late last night. A Ukrainian nationalist was stabbed to death when pro-Russia and pro-Ukraine demonstrators clashed in Donetsk on Thursday.
Mr Turchinov, quoted by local media, closed the parliamentary session by saying: "The situation is very dangerous. I'm not exaggerating. There is a real danger from threats of invasion of Ukrainian territory and we will reconvene on Monday at 10."
Other members of the Western-backed interim administration, which Russian president Vladimir Putin
...Second and fourth President of the Russian Federation and the first to remain sober. Putin is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from polonium poisoning. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to Putin. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead...says supports Ukrainian ultra-nationalists hostile to ethnic Russians, urged people in the east not to be drawn into violence stirred up by Moscow.
Russian forces occupied Crimea two weeks ago, triggering an ominous confrontation with Western powers, after Mr Putin said he would protect Crimea's ethnic Russian majority and compatriots elsewhere in Ukraine. As Crimeans vote in a referendum tomorrow that could bring annexation by Moscow, Kiev fears Russia could widen the scope of its takeover by moving troops into the east.