Denis looked at me and asked what I was doing in Luhansk. I began to talk nervously about civilian casualties, and how a stepped-up war was having disastrous effect on families here. I said it was unclear what Ukraine’s strategy was and whether the government was worried about civilian deaths.

“This doesn’t matter to me,” he said, staring at me, his face impassive. I froze, thinking something bad was coming. Instead, things got curiouser. “I’m a mercenary from Russia,” he said, seated on a bench next to me in the tiny kitchen. “I don’t give a damn about any of this.”

I nodded as if I understood, but inside, I was utterly confused. Why would this man be telling me this? Who is he really and what does he want? How much of this is he making up?

The strangeness of the situation eclipsed any fear. The man had ordered me into his car, but at no point had he threatened me or taken my phones. He was clearly interested in having his girlfriend meet an oddball foreigner, and I was beginning to get the impression that he was simply bored.

It got weirder. He explained that he had gone from war to war for most of his 34 years, most recently to Syria, and that he was one of about 50 Russian citizens here being paid for supporting the fight against Ukraine’s government. He did not say who paid him, but said that the group formed the heart of the rebel forces by default. Most of the insurgents here — about 80 percent in his words — were scrappy locals, taxi drivers and coal miners who had never before seen battle. An additional 20 percent were better because they had fought in Afghanistan.

There were other manpower problems, he said. A lot of local people signed up in a burst of emotion and then quit after a few weeks. And so many fighters were now assigned to the border areas and the outside edges of the city that there were very few left to protect Luhansk itself. To their advantage, he said, was the fact that Ukrainian soldiers also seemed to be afraid to fight.

I asked him timidly what the prognosis was for the fight in Luhansk.

“Honestly, they’re going to come in,” he said, referring to the Ukrainian military. “Fifty people is not enough,” he said. I asked him how long it would take. “No one can tell you that.”