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“They won’t get a nice welcome in Donetsk, let’s just say that,” said Volodya, waving a baton of rolled-up leaflets towards Ukrainian troops he imagined approaching from Kyiv.

“Those who come with good intentions are treated well here. But woe betide anyone who thinks they can push Donetsk around. We’re tough – miners, metalworkers, builders – we know how to work, and how to fight.”

At 71, Volodya said he was too old to man the barricades outside this city’s looming local government building, which is now plastered with posters denouncing the European Union, the United States and the new government in Kyiv.

Russian flags
It also bristles with Russian flags and the tricolour of the Donetsk People’s Republic, whose creation was announced by pro-Moscow activists who seized the building last week.

The barricades of old metal and tyres are guarded by men who wear balaclavas and orange-and-black ribbons that are traditional Russian emblems of the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany, and now symbolise resistance toKyiv.

“We are defending our people. Defending our rights,” says one young man, who declined to give his name and occasionally clanged a heavy iron rod on the ground.

“From what?” he laughed mirthlessly, incredulous at the question. “From the fascists. And from the West, who paid for all the chaos in Kyiv.”

Donetsk, a million-strong city surrounded by Soviet-era coalmines and heavy industry, is the hub of resistance to the uprising that ousted President Viktor Yanukovich and ushered in a pro-western government backed by nationalists whom critics call Russian-hating neo-Nazis.

‘Slaves to the EU’

People across this region are sceptical or openly hostile to what they call a cabal of corrupt politicians from western and central Ukraine, who came to power on the back of a bloody coup sponsored by Washington and Brussels.

“The government doesn’t listen to us, it doesn’t care about us. They want to ban the Russian language and make us slaves to the EU and Nato. What good are they to us? Russia is here, next to us, our brotherly nation, and they want to cut us off from each other,” said Olya Mironenko, a retired teacher in Donetsk.

Like many people here, she associates the West above all with the misery of the 1990s, when the promise of market democracy delivered poverty, violence and corruption to the former Soviet Union, and its republics were forced to go cap-in-hand to their cold war adversaries for aid. They have not forgotten that humiliation, and expect something similar from the prospect of integration with the EU.

“The bandits in Kyiv don’t want to talk to us and now they are sending in tanks and God knows what else to bomb us. We have to defend ourselves – and we have to ask Russia for help,” Ms Mironenko said.

Kyiv and the West say Russia is already here, in the shape of the men in camouflage, carrying modern Russian weapons, who have seized official buildings in about 10 towns in Donetsk region in recent days.

Ukraine’s security services claim to have arrested more than a dozen Russian operatives and intercepted phone calls that reveal the unrest is co-ordinated by Russian intelligence agents and “political technologists” close to the Kremlin.