The thugs from the east agitating Ukraine’s protest for change
They wore balaclavas, surgical masks and scarves to hide their their faces. In their hands they held baseball bats, sticks and – in one case – electric cable to use as a makeshift whip.
An elderly woman with a thin line of scarlet lipstick and a fur coat sidled up to me.
“You come all the way to Donetsk and then you film the worst people we have!” she said.
These are the titushki, uneducated thugs, many of them petty criminals, who have disrupted Ukraine’s anti-government demonstrations by beating up protesters or acting as agents provocateurs.
They see the “maidan” protesters in Kiev and western Ukraine as a threat to their Russian language and culture, and fear they will now be marginalised and discriminated against.
Today they were determined to show they are still strong in eastern Ukraine despite the collapse of government in Kiev. A few yards away a handful of pro-change “maidan” protesters were laying wreaths in front of a statue of a Ukrainian poet – the local police chief advised them to leave and most did. No question which side is in the majority here.
They shook their fists in the air and chanted “Donbass! Donbass!”, the name of their home region on the border with Russia. They are hard men and this is a hard place. Biting wind froze our faces, and a few flakes of snow fell.
There are working coalmines in town, and long train carrying coal trundled right through the centre. I felt safe only because the police chief had assigned us two flak-jacketed policemen as bodyguards.
But I found few supporters of Donetsk’s most famous son, the newly ousted President Viktor Yanukovich. He tried to fly out of the airport yesterday but was spotted and stopped by an observant customs official.
Residents of Donetsk have watched his family get wealthy during his time in office – they regard him as corrupt.
“No-one here likes Yanukovich but everyone’s afraid of chaos,” explained one man.
They do, however, like the forces of the state. The Berkut riot police, reviled in Kiev for their brutality, are heroes here.
A squad of them, like ninjas in their padded flak jackets and helmets, paraded through the crowd to cheers and cries of “Berkut! Berkut!”
The villains here are the European Union and people from western Ukraine.
“In Germany they have legalised paedophilia. Europeans teach their childen about sex before they’re six years old!” said a man in a blue windjacket. He and his friends fingered their baseball bats.
I asked if they would like to separate from the European-leaning west of Ukraine. “Yes!” they shouted. “We would like to be with Russia and Belarus because we have the same culture and history.”
After filming the demonstration we said goodbye to our police bodyguards and drove down to the giant statue of Lenin where more titushki were gathered waving red hammer-and-sickle flags.
I felt that I had stepped back in time to the early 1990s as the Soviet Union fell apart.
A large drunken man blocked us from filming – he hated the European Union, he explained, so as its representatives we should leave.
We tried to argue but suddenly a menacing group of half a dozen heavies in black leather jackets appeared. Without a police bodyguard there was no way we could film.
In Kiev and Lviv they may be celebrating the downfall of President Yanukovich, but in Donetsk they’re still hoping that Russia will save them from the evil, decadent European Union and its stooges in western Ukraine.
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