Neither he nor his sister, a peasant woman in a Russian-patterned head scarf, expected anything from the separatist leaders who have declared a Luhansk People’s Republic in the region. “Where will they get the money?” she asked. “If they had money, they could have already started construction brigades or something.”

She declined to give her name, reflecting a common reluctance here to speak freely against the rebel authorities.

“I don’t care what country we live in or what it is called; I just want peace,” she said. “I just want gas, water and school for the children.” The family was living with others in the basement of the village school. Her 5-year-old granddaughter, hollow-eyed and mute, could not sleep, she said, but they could not afford the fare to send her to her aunt in Russia.

Already a region of high unemployment and poverty, southeastern Ukraine faces an economic and humanitarian crisis, with more than 3,000 civilians killed and possibly as many combatants, billions of dollars of destruction to private and public buildings, and more than one million people displaced.

“We are not scared,” said Vladimir Titov, a former factory worker now volunteering with the rebels. “We want a free administration. We don’t want to be under Russia. We want our own state, and we will pay our taxes and keep the money here.” Russia is already helping with free gas supplies to rebel-held areas, he said.

Yet despite the bravado of the rebels, there is a growing realization here that Russia is not going to annex the Donbass region, as it did the strategic Crimea Peninsula in March, and that it may not help much beyond limited handouts of aid. “There are six million people in Donbass, and Putin does not need us,” said Yevgeny, a retired doctor living in the mining town of Snizhne. “He just needs to stir things up here, and that’s not good for us.”