‘Drive 20km in some areas and you might change your watch five times’

The Ukrainian soldier hands back the passports and waves the car out of the checkpoint.

“We’re taking down details of people of heading east,” he explains, as camouflage-clad comrades bustle between porta-cabins recently placed on the road into rebel Donetsk.

“This is the administrative border now.”

There is no change in the frosty fields where sunflowers blazed all through the summer, in villages that seem to sag wearily by the road, or in figures bent against the fading daylight to haul potatoes from the heavy earth of their allotments.

“Change your watch,” laughs Grisha, the driver. “We’re in a different country now.”

When the rest of Ukraine turned back the clocks last weekend, the separatists running much of Donetsk and Luhansk regions refused, a move that synchronised them with Moscow and symbolised their connection to Russia and rejection of Kiev and Europe.

“It’s great,” insists Grisha, “now I’m on the same time as my relatives and friends in Russia when I call.”

A little further down the road, he adds: “Though it is a bit weird, having to check what time people are using when you makes plan to meet; buses, trains, doctors appointments, things like that. And it’s not even the whole region: if the Ukrainian army’s there, it’s Ukrainian time; if it’s the militia, it’s ‘Donetsk’ time – drive 20 km in some areas and you might change your watch five times.”

Life has become very strange, very quickly, for people living in Donetsk.

Two summers ago, the industrial city was looking better than ever, as new hotels, parks, bars and restaurants sprang up to welcome hundreds of thousands of fans coming for the Euro 2012 football championships.

Now shelling has shattered swathes of the soaring Donbass Arena's glass facade, and though billboards still carry fading adverts offering season tickets for Shakhtar, Ukraine's richest and strongest club, the team plays its 'home' games 1,200km away in Lviv, as close to Poland as Donetsk is to Russia.

On Pushkin Boulevard, where tableaux tell how Welsh steel man John Hughes founded Donetsk in 1869, workers still tend flowerbeds laid for a sporting festival that was supposed to bind this city more closely to Europe.

No idea who’s paying “Don’t talk to me about football,” says Oleg, climbing a ladder to fix a street lamp as colleagues sweep fallen leaves from paths and benches.

“It’s like a different world now. But at least we’re still being paid. I’ve no idea who’s paying, Kiev or the new guys, but our money comes in. My daughter and her husband haven’t been paid for months at the coal mine.”

A short walk away, about 30 elderly women are gathered at the entrance to the towering regional council building that is now the headquarters of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR).

In the middle of a bright huddle of winter coats, big hair and furry berets, a slight lady from the rebel administration bats away their questions by repeating one powerful word. “It’s disinformation. Dez-infor-mat-si-ya. Don’t listen to disinformation.”

The word alone, still mysterious despite its familiarity, instantly seems to convince the pensioners that resistance is futile.

“Disinformation,” murmurs Lyudmila, nodding as if she expected as much.

“We heard that if we came here we could re-register somehow and receive our pensions. We haven’t been given any money since July.”

The pensioners’ woes do not disturb the apparent calm inside rebel headquarters.

As they have for months, posters denouncing Ukraine's "fascist" leaders and their western backers hang on the walls, alongside paeans to Russia, its president Vladimir Putin and the fledgling, unrecognised republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.

There is now a black-framed tribute to passengers on Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, which was shot down near Donetsk in July, it says, "in a war crime committed by the Ukrainian army"; Kiev and the West blame the rebels for the tragedy.

But back in early spring the lift didn’t work, and the staircase was often crammed with bags, boxes and big men with guns. On the climb, the paper-plastered glass doors offered a glimpse of each floor, where order did not appear to reign.

In May, one of the most professional rebel units, called Vostok, evicted the occupants of the fetid building, after they added to the chaos inside and around the city by robbing a major supermarket and stashing the loot in their headquarters.

Now the corridors are clean, the elevators work and the feeling of frenzy has subsided; ministries and agencies of state are appearing around the city, the latest being a central bank. In time, leaders of the DNR have pledged, the Ukrainian hryvnia currency will be phased out in favour of the Russian rouble.

Whether Kiev likes it or not, and regardless of the economic sanctions slapped on the rebels and their Russian backers, the two strange pseudo-statelets in eastern Ukraine are not going away.

In August, Ukraine's troops nearly defeated them, and Russian army units turned the tide. They helped the rebels inflict heavy losses on Kiev's forces and seize land along the coast, prompting President Petro Poroshenko to seek a ceasefire.

Rather than disappearing, the rebel republics are now likely to grab more of Kiev’s territory, and could unite in a reborn Novorossiya (“New Russia”), which Putin now calls parts of modern Ukraine that were controlled by tsarist Russia 150 years ago.

Many of the seven million people living in Donetsk and Luhansk may be baffled by their new reality – with its changing time zones, vanishing pensions, doomed airliners and “administrative boundaries” – but the changes are relentless.

Strange limbo

Tomorrow will see the DNR and LNR – with public support from Russia – take another major step towards the long-term, de-facto division of Ukraine.

Elections will be held to find leaders for the republics and deputies for new “people’s councils” but – typically for this strange limbo – the vote will be rather odd.

People in Donetsk seem to know of only one leadership candidate – the separatists' current "prime minister" Alexander Zakharchenko, and his is the face that dominates billboards around the city.

The “parliamentary” election is even stranger, with locals unsure which parties or organisations are running, never mind what their policies might be.

"I think the communists are running," ventures Sergei, a miner who refuses to give his surname. "But it's all decided already, and we know where."

He means Russia, not rebel headquarters, but that does not bother him.

“I support the DNR, and I don’t want us to live with Ukraine again. Not after what they’ve done to us, and all the blood that’s been shed,” Sergei explains.

More than 3,700 people have been killed since April, and about one million have been driven from their homes by often indiscriminate bombing.

“It’s wartime, so it doesn’t matter if we don’t have perfect elections,” says Sergei.

“Let Russia organise things, get us on our feet, get the mines and factories working again. Then, bit by bit, we’ll develop our state and our democracy.”

Many in eastern Ukraine trust Moscow to lead them through the fog that has engulfed their region – even if they cannot yet discern where they are going.

“You must understand that there’s no going back,” Zakharchenko said on what passes for the campaign trail in today’s Donetsk.

“Our former country no longer exists.”