Passions reached boiling point on Wednesday in Ukraine ahead of the February 7 presidential polls runoff as MPs came to blows in parliament.

The fight started ten minutes before a break in today's extraordinary meeting when members of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko's bloc clashed with opposition Party of Regions MPs.

Volodymyr Bondarenko, a member of the Tymoshenko bloc, and opposition parliamentarian Andrei Klyuyev were the first to hit out at each other. A number of other MPs then waded in.

The fighting was triggered by Party of Regions suspicions that the Tymoshenko bloc intended to disrupt the meeting, which the opposition had called to discuss election procedures.

Opposition legislators blocked the Supreme Rada before the start of today's meeting, with a group of Party of Regions members spending last night at the session hall.

"I do not follow the logic of the Party of Regions, because inviting us to an extraordinary meeting and then closing the door in our faces seems very paradoxical," deputy speaker Mykola Tomenko said.

Anna German, Yanukovych's deputy, said her party was "protecting" the rostrum and the microphone from the Tymoshenko bloc.

"We know... that the Tymoshenko bloc is planning to disrupt today's extraordinary meeting so as to block amendments to the law on presidential elections that would ensure there will be no disruption of the polls," she said.

Yanukovych and Tymoshenko currently have equal representation at all polling stations ahead of Sunday's voting. However, the Party of Regions has been pushing for amendments to the law on presidential elections to provide against the absence of Tymoshenko's representatives, something which would invalidate the results from any polling station where it occurred.

Yanukovych enjoys the support of mainly Russian-speaking eastern regions. He won the first round of the elections with 35% of the vote against 25% for Tymoshenko. Ukraine's outgoing President Viktor Yushchenko received just 5% in the first round.

KIEV, February 3 (RIA Novosti)