“What Putin wants is for Ukraine to be weak,” said Lucan A. Way, a political scientist at the University of Toronto who specializes in Ukraine and has lived in Donetsk. “Just because he gives verbal support for the new Ukrainian government does not mean that he will stop trying to foment unrest in the east.”

By issuing statements of support, Mr. Putin “gets to look like a statesman,” and blame whatever problems emerge on the new government, Professor Way said. “He has created a Frankenstein that he cannot control, and may not even want to,” he said.

Many in Ukraine had feared that Mr. Putin sought the eastern regions themselves, and was putting troops in position to potentially seize them in the same way he did Crimea, the southern peninsula on the Black Sea that Russia annexed two months ago, setting off a major international confrontation.

But a subtler maneuver is now emerging, and many experts believe that the most desirable result for Mr. Putin would be for the troubled areas to devolve into breakaway status, similar to South Ossetia within Georgia and Transnistria within Moldova, a possibility that ordinary citizens are already talking about.

“It’s a mess, it’s anarchy,” said Yevgeny Kaplenko, a retired welder, who stood near his small brick house and yard planted with roses near the airport, as gunfire popped. “This is going to be a second Transnistria. That’s what awaits us.”