LISICHANSK, Ukraine – Frustration with the Kyiv central government is getting almost palpable in some places in eastern Ukraine. Nowhere is this discontent felt more than in cities where a military campaign with no clear objectives, combined with lack of reforms and outreach by the central government, have brought on an eerie anxiety.Vitaly Shvedov, former head of the anti-terrorist operation’s headquarters in Lisichansk, an industrial city in Luhansk Oblast, is angry with the aimlessness of the central authorities and says the war in the east should stop being called an “anti-terrorist operation” by the government.

“The anti-terrorist operation ended when the first artillery shell was fired. You can’t cure a disease if you don’t diagnose it correctly,” Shvedov said. “But now people think the war is somewhere on another planet.”

The war in Ukraine’s two eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk — once home to nearly 15 percent of Ukraine’s population — has been going on since March, when administrative buildings were taken over by teams of Kremlin-backed separatists. As the Russian-led forces continued to advance, Ukraine pushed back and eventually went on the offensive.

That attack was halted by the end of August, when Russia moved its

regular troops to the Donbas and intensified arms supplies, leading to

the massacre in Illovaisk that killed hundreds of Ukrainian troops and

prompted the Sept. 5 cease-fire in Minsk that Russia has violated

repeatedly.

“The offensive did not stop on its own. It was stopped administratively,” Shvedov said.

Shvedov

said that Poroshenko could have continued the offensive, especially if

martial law and total mobilization had been introduced.

“When

Lisichansk was freed (by the Ukrainian army in July), Luhansk was almost

empty, there were just 200 insurgents there,” he said, arguing that

separatists’ resources were meager. Instead, the provinial capital of

Luhansk has now been under separatist control for months.

Shvedov

says Poroshenko bowed to Western pressure to halt the offensive because

America and the European Union want a lengthy conflict that would waste

Russia’s resources. Shvedov believes Ukraine should go on the offensive

again.

Currently there are no more than 10,000 Russian troops in

eastern Ukraine, and the Kremlin is unlikely to move “tens of thousands”

of troops there and does not have resources for such a large-scale war,

Shvedov said.

He said information that Russia had to staff some

of its units in Donbas with cadets is proof of the poor state of its

military.

However, Oleksandr Rozmaznin, acting head of the personnel

department of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, said that there are 32,400

fighters in Donbas now altogether, including up to 10,000 from the

Russian army, according to estimates by the general staff. “The rest

are mercenaries and members of the so-called illegal paramilitary

groups,” he said at a briefing on Dec. 4.

Vladislav Seleznyov, a spokesman for the government anti-terrorist operation’s headquarters, disagreed with Shvedov.

“To

fulfill military tasks, one must have necessary human and other

resources,” he said. “When Russian regular troops entered Ukraine (in

August), the ratio that would allow Ukraine to free occupied territories

was disrupted.”

Seleznyov said it would be incorrect to talk about a

Ukrainian offensive now because the country is strictly adhering to the

Sept. 5 Minsk cease-fire agreement.

Shevdov also accused Poroshenko of compromising too eagerly with the Kremlin.

He

sees this as a result of a pact that Poroshenko has with the country’s

former top officials from the Party of Regions once led by ousted

President Viktor Yanukovych.

“Poroshenko allows them to keep their capital and positions and they, in exchange, resolve the Russian problem,” he says.

Shvedov

tried to provide some counter-balance to that policy by running in the

Oct. 26 parliamentary election in the Lisichansk constituency. He lost

to Serhiy Dunayev, an incumbent who belonged to the Party of Regions.

Local

media had reported that Dunayev, a former mayor, in an address to the

Lisichansk city council, called for “help from Russian brothers” and

said that it was only temporary that the Ukrainian government controls

the oblast.