DONETSK, Ukraine — To the casual observer, this is not a city at war. Masked men are confined to a few buildings in the center of town, where children on in-line skates pass by. City workers tend to flowers in meticulously planted parks. Crowded open-air cafes spill onto sidewalks and into parks. Pfizer is holding a conference at the Ramada, where grilled sea bass is on the menu.

But inside living rooms and offices, something has changed. A teacher has been dropped by 20 friends since he posted a picture of himself at a pro-Kiev protest on a Russian social media website. A construction worker no longer speaks to his Muscovite father. A journalist has left the country, afraid for the safety of her 3-month-old son.

On Sunday, Ukraine will hold its first national election since a bloody upheaval in February deposed the elected government and pitched the country into chaos. But the vote itself will not answer the bigger question of whether Ukraine will hang together as a country. That question will be decided mostly here, in the country’s anguished eastern regions, and will turn on whether ordinary people feel that the vote — and the country that Ukraine is becoming — belongs to them, too.

The West hopes that the election will heal the wounds and provide stability to Ukraine. On Friday, even Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — who seized Crimea and, the West believes, worked hard to destabilize southeastern Ukraine — said his country would respect the outcome of the vote.