An estimated 50,000 pro-Western Ukrainians massed on Sunday in the heart of Kiev amid swelling anger over the bloody beating of prominent former minister turned opposition leader Yuriy Lutsenko.

The 49-year-old member of jailed ex-Premier Yulia Tymoshenko's cabinet was transferred out of intensive care on Saturday evening after being attacked by truncheon-wielding police during a small protest the night before.

Ukraine's ex-interior minister turned opposition leader Yuriy Lutsenko was in intensive care in hospital Saturday after being beaten in fresh clashes between pro-EU demonstrators and club-wielding police.

A few hundred nationalist demonstrators protested late Friday outside a Kiev court that had earlier in the day sentenced three men to six years in prison for allegedly plotting to blow up a statue of Soviet founder Lenin near the city's main airport in 2011.

More than 10,000 people gathered in central Kiev Sunday for the first major opposition rally of the new year as protests against Ukraine's scrapping of an EU pact stretched into a seventh week.

Opposition leaders including former heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko urged the crowd to continue the standoff on Independence Square, also known as the Maidan, where protesters have been camped out since late November.

A Ukrainian court on Friday launched highly-charged hearings against jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko's attorney that government critics have branded a political show trial.

Former prime minister Tymoshenko's lawyer Sergiy Vlasenko is accused by his former wife of domestic violence -- a case that emerged in November just as Ukraine was deciding whether to sign a historic agreement with the European Union.

Prominent Ukrainian journalist Tetyana Chornovol, who was brutally beaten this week, said Friday that she had been attacked as revenge following her investigative work on President Viktor Yanukovych and other top officials.

In an interview from her hospital bed to the pro-opposition television Channel 5, she said that the attack "had not been by accident", after her investigation of the luxury residences of Ukraine's political elite.

Unknown assailants have savagely beaten a dogged Ukrainian journalist who has taken part in pro-EU rallies, triggering outrage among the opposition locked in a confrontation with President Viktor Yanukovych.

Tetyana Chornovil, who writes for the Ukrainska Pravda opposition website, was attacked overnight Tuesday outside the capital Kiev, police said in a statement, citing the journalist.

Ukraine on Tuesday received $3.0 billion in the first tranche of a financial rescue plan from Russia that has been denounced by the pro-European opposition, Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov said.

"The National Bank of Ukraine has received the first tranche on its account. It is a stabilizing factor for us," he said during talks with his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev in Moscow, the Ukrainian government website quoted him as saying.

Ukraine has banned entry to former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili and 35 other foreigners suspected of working with the opposition "to destabilize" the country amid mass pro-EU protests, a report said Tuesday.

The Ukrainian foreign ministry and the security service have declared Saakashvili, 29 other Georgians, five US citizens and one Serb as persona non grata, the Kommersant Ukraine daily reported.

Ukraine's opposition is in disarray after failing to offer a clear agenda to their supporters in response to the signing by President Viktor Yanukovych of a bailout deal with Russia, analysts say.

While the protests against the authorities' decision to scrap an integration pact with the EU under Kremlin pressure have continued in the streets of Kiev, opposition leaders appear unable to harness this support in an effective way.

Some 40,000 people on Sunday rallied at the latest protest in Ukraine against the government's rejection of a pact with the European Union, a turnout that was down sharply on previous weeks.

The rally on Independence Square in the capital Kiev was the fifth in a series of regular Sunday protests against the U-turn by the government in November, when it decided not to sign the Association Agreement for closer ties with the EU.