A bill granting autonomy to Ukraine’s restive eastern regions cleared its first parliamentary hurdle on Monday but sparked a violent right-wing protest that left a national guardsman dead and more than 120 people injured.

The recently conscripted guardsman was killed when a grenade was thrown into a cordon of police and special forces guarding the Supreme Council in central Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, where lawmakers had just held a rowdy debate over the proposed decentralization of government.

The clashes outside parliament sent 122 people to the hospital, mostly police and guardsman, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.

Under a Feb. 12 peace agreement between the Ukrainian government and the Moscow-backed separatists occupying two large regions of eastern Ukraine, lawmakers are obliged to grant more autonomy to regional governments to allow them to decide their own economic and foreign policies.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is seen to have instigated the separatist rebellion in eastern Ukraine when he sent paratroopers to Ukraine’s Crimea region in late February 2014 and seized the strategic Black Sea peninsula. Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014, stirring international protest over the forced change of established borders that led to the imposition of sanctions on Moscow a year ago.

Kremlin officials deny involvement in the war that has ravaged eastern Ukraine and left at least 6,800 dead over the last 16 months, according to United Nations’ estimates.

The bill debated Monday passed with 265 votes out of the 450-member Supreme Council but faced fierce opposition from nationalist parties, including some aligned with the political factions of President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk.

Former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko denounced the measure as a capitulation to Putin’s sowing of separatist unrest in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.


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