DONETSK, Ukraine — As workers streamed into the Donetsk Metallurgical Plant, a sprawling, Soviet-era factory complex here, they had a message for protesters in Kiev’s Independence Square: Get back to work.

“The answer is simple: Get some tanks and drive them off the square,” said Viktor Ruzyenko, a 30-year veteran of the factory who was coming off the night shift into the early morning frost. “Even under the Communists I never saw anything so disgraceful.”

Top Western diplomats and opposition leaders have called on Ukraine’s president, Viktor F. Yanukovich, to respect public sentiment and sign an association agreement with the European Union, and the protesters want him to resign. But in a country deeply divided between the pro-European West and the pro-Russian East, that is only half the story. Here in eastern Ukraine, the base of Mr. Yanukovich’s support, people envision a different future: a quick end to the protests and a deal to join the customs union of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, which would bind Ukraine more closely with Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan.