Arkady Ostrovsky is Moscow bureau chief for the Economist.

It’s March 16, and I’m flying again to Kharkiv in vulnerable eastern Ukraine. On the very day that Crimeans on the other side of the country are voting to join Russia in a bogus referendum hastily organized by the Kremlin’s puppets, in Kharkiv there are reports of Russian troops massing less than 20 miles away from the Ukrainian border. Provocations are expected, and just yesterday shooting flared in the city between pro-Russian protesters and a group of Ukrainian nationalists. It is hard to say if either group acted on someone else’s instructions—that is what I am here to try to find out.

I had been in Kharkiv three weeks ago too—four days after Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country. As I got on the plane then in Moscow, where I live, I had spotted two men in their 50s. One was tall but otherwise nondescript. The other was plump, in a business suit, glasses and a leather overcoat that sported a pin of the Russian flag. The plump one was talking on his mobile phone about the situation in Kharkiv. He seemed well-informed. I asked a casual question—something like, “How is it there at the moment?” The man measured me up, realized that I was a native Russian speaker—I was born and raised in Moscow—and told me, “It will be fine.”


“What do you mean?” I asked him. “I hear Yanukovych has fled, and things could get violent.”

“Never mind,” he answered. “Now that the Sochi [Olympics] is over, we will sort them out,” he said with a smile, which made me highly uncomfortable. He didn’t specify who “them” was—he didn’t have to.

I have met men like this before, while reporting about the KGB and its long post-Soviet afterlife in today’s Russia. But there was something particularly nasty about those two. They spoke softly, in half-jokes that gave you goose bumps.

The memory of them has stayed with me as I’ve reported over the last few weeks on the extraordinary events unfolding in Ukraine, along the beaches where I used to vacation as a child growing up in the Soviet Union and in the rundown potholed streets of cities that look just like those across the border in Russia. As Moscow bureau chief for the Economist, I have been covering Ukraine for the past seven years. But since December, when protests in Kyiv’s Maidan, or Independence Square, gathered momentum, I was there every other week, observing a most remarkable and moving process that can only be described as the birth of a nation—23 years after Ukraine officially got its independence.

On Feb. 19 and 20, the protests turned to revolt after Yanukovych, a corrupt, autocratic and cowardly thug bought and paid for by Russia, used violence against his own people, first unleashing his riot police on the crowds in the Maidan, then deploying snipers who killed nearly 100 people. I was in Moscow when the violence broke out in Kyiv. But on Feb. 22 I set out to Ukraine to report on what was clearly Europe’s biggest revolution in years. This is my diary of what I saw in the days and weeks that followed.

***

February 22

I am in Lviv, a beautiful university city in Western Ukraine. After the night of clashes on Kyiv’s Maidan, Lviv also rose against Yanukovych’s government. A few police stations, prosecutors’ offices and a military base got sacked by protesters. Some weapons were taken. After an explosion inside a military unit, two charred bodies, one in riot-police uniform, were found. Then, the police vanished from the streets. But by the time I arrive two days later, it has all gone quiet. Taxi drivers organized themselves into city patrols, communicating over the radio. The popular mayor, Andriy Sadovyi, is clearly in charge. Young, bespectacled, walking freely around his own city with no bodyguards, he could be the mayor of any European city. But then Lviv is European.

Residents survey the damage done by anti-government protesters during the night in Lviv on Feb. 19. | Getty Images

An important trading center and university town since the 14th century, modern Lviv has been Soviet Lvov, Polish Lwów and Austro-Hungarian Lemberg over the course of its tumultuous past 100 years. It was seized by the Soviet Union in 1939, but guerrilla resistance was intense. It was broken only in the 1950s, and the Soviets never really succeeded in breaking Lviv’s sense of its own belonging in Europe. It jubilantly supported the Western-oriented crowds who powered the Orange Revolution in 2004 and was bitterly disillusioned by the failure of that revolution’s squabbling leaders to modernize and reform the country in the years that followed.

In the presidential election of 2010, most Western Ukrainians simply did not turn up to vote, letting the Russian-speaking eastern and southern part of the country elect Yanukovych against Yulia Tymoshenko, the prime minister from one of the Orange Revolution’s key factions. Yet Yanukovych never really controlled Lviv. Every governor he appointed was soon kicked out; his Party of Regions had no presence in the local parliament. By the time the protests broke out in December, with huge crowds turning out against Yanukovych’s decision to end accession talks with the European Union and instead accept a $15 billion bailout—strings clearly attached—from Russia instead, police and internal troops from Lviv refused to disperse protesters. In fact, Sadovyi tells me, the local riot police asked the citizens to block their unit to disable them from leaving their barracks.

We are speaking in his elegant office decorated with a map of Galicia, the former Austro-Hungarian province of which Lemberg was once the capital. Sadovyi says Ukraine can function as one country only if economic powers and political responsibilities are decentralized to city level. “There is no separatism in Lviv. We want Ukraine to stay as one country—this is what our men were dying for in Kyiv,” he argues.

Outside, a large banner hangs across the classical 19 th-century façade of the Lviv city hall, which dominates an Italianesque square. “ Vilne Mesto Vilnikh Liudei” it proclaims—Free City of Free People. The banner appeared few weeks ago, when protests in Kyiv evolved into a revolutionary movement and thousands of Lviv’s activists travelled to Kyiv to defend it. As I am talking with the mayor here, Yanukovych is in Kyiv, negotiating with the foreign ministers of Poland and Germany. They agree that he will stay in power until the end of December.

I go next to meet with a local leader of the Right Sector, the umbrella group for several nationalist organizations responsible for radicalizing the protest in Kyiv; the attack they led on the riot police took the whole protest on the Maidan to a new, more violent and unpredictable level. When Russian propaganda talks about the “fascist” threat to Ukraine, this is who they mean. A large, burly man speaking in a slow, deep voice tells me that here in Lviv that the Right Sector has a political and a militant arm but at present is busy helping to patrol the city. I ask if I can come along on a night patrol. He agrees, and I am soon driving in a battered old Mercedes around Lviv, which is completely quiet. My companions do not want to speak Russian to me, and I only understand about half of what they are saying in Ukrainian. But it is enough to feel that these men are ready to fight just like their grandfathers did.

After an hour-and-a-half tour, I need a drink. But there is none to be had: The mayor ruled that no alcohol is to be sold after 6 p.m.—as part of the mourning for the dead, but I also suspect to prevent any disorder in the city. A colleague from the New York Times and I go to dinner with a businessmen, Mark Zarkhin, who owns 200 restaurants across Ukraine, including the one where we are eating. He tells me how he let his staff go to protest on the Maidan while keeping their salaries, how he distributed food to protesters in Lviv and how one of his restaurants in Kyiv became a shelter for the wounded. We break the rule and have couple of shots of homemade vodka. Late at night, I attend a moving vigil for the victims of the Maidan shootings; many of them were from the Lviv region, and two were from Lviv itself.Priests intone prayers. Thousands hold candles and chant in deep and sometimes choked voices: “Glory to the heroes” and “Heroes do not die.”

February 24

Today, I’m in Kharkiv, an industrial city that is double the size of Lviv. It has some attractive turn-of-the-20th-century architecture, but it feels like a typical Soviet city, complete with a statue of Lenin still standing in the middle. When I show up, a large crowd is there singing Soviet songs. On the other side of the square, in front of the local government administration building, is a smaller group of aggressive-looking youths—these are the local supporters of the Euromaidan crowdin the revolutionary capital, and they have now seized the administration building—a hostile move in a Russian-speaking town that has supported Yanukovych’s Party of Regions.

From across the square the two sides glare at each other; the local men and women give the young revolutionaries angry side looks and shake their heads. “Idiots” is the softest expletive people use. The previous night this crowd, led by the writer Sergei Zhodan, tried to topple Lenin’s monument here. But they were pushed back by Lenin defenders. There is no government in the city any longer. The mayor and the governor have disappeared. But if there’s a strange void, it’s a relatively quiet one; there’s no anarchy I can see, no chaos either.

I meet Zurab Alazania, a local journalist who runs an online news agency, Mediaport. He brings me inside his office, takes off his coat and removes his gun. “Can’t be too careful these days,” he says. He tells me that the city’s powerful mayor, Gennady Kernes, a supporter of Yanukovych, is on his way back to Kharkiv—nobody knows from where. I immediatelyhead to the airport, where there are already cameras waiting for Kernes. His private plane lands, and he emerges from the VIP lounge—a slight man with harsh and cunning eyes—surrounded by several large bodyguards, their pockets bulging with guns.

Pro-Russian supporters attend a rally under the statue of Lenin in the centre of eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on March 8, 2014. | Getty Images

He looks like a Godfather figure. He speaks calmly, displaying a sense of humor. “Where had he been?” several journalists shout. “I had an important meeting which had been scheduled long before. I went to see a friend in Geneva. On the way back I stopped in Moscow. I never fled—I was just absent for 12 hours.” Where is Yanukovych? “In the past.” Does he recognize the new government? “Victors cannot be judged. But they would be doubly victors if they turned their foes into their friends.” A wink and a smile. Where is the mayor going now? “To the demonstration by Lenin’s statue—to calm people down.”

As he walks off, I ask him if I can ride in his car. “Jump in.” A black Land Cruiser with curtained windows takes off at great speed, followed by another one with bodyguards. “Drive normally—no special signals, no racing,” Kernes instructs his driver. He tells me the new interim government in Kyiv formed by the opposition leaders is blackmailing him, insisting he give up power, but he is still in charge of the situation. He says he has no interest in Kharkiv seceding from Ukraine and will work with the new government if they stop harassing him. As we approach the center of the city, we hit heavier traffic. “Come on, faster. Stop pussying around. Drive!” he says impatiently. Seconds later the car comes to a screeching halt by Lenin’s statue. Kernes jumps out to unbelievable cheers from the crowd. I try to follow him, but he is consumed by the throng, and I lose sight of him.

That evening I fly to Kyiv and go to the Maidan. It looks like a city after a war. The trade union building, which served as the headquarters of the protest movement, is blackened. A piece of a Ukrainian flag is fluttering from a balcony. I smell the smoky fires keeping people warm. Two months ago there was a festive, uplifting atmosphere here. Now, women are carrying flowers for the dead; coffins are floating above people’s heads, and priests are intoning prayers from the stage. A heavy atmosphere of hatred, anger and disbelief, quiet tears and loud words, shrines of candles, flowers and photographs for the “heaven’s battalion”—the 80 men who died from sniper fire and riot police guns a few days earlier. The police are gone. Traffic is directed by men and women from the samo-oborona—or self-defense—volunteer fighters who defended the barricades on the Maidan. The Maidan itself has already turned into a tourist attraction, a museum to a revolution that is far from complete.

A woman holding carnations walks through the Maidan on February 25, 2014. | Getty Images

February 26

From the stage of the Maidan, a new government is being announced. It all seems highly theatrical. The names of mainstream politicians are booed. The names of Maidan activists are cheered. “Shame!” shout the people in the crowd when Alexander Turchinov, the acting president, appears onstage. He tries to project his voice: “The only legitimate power today in Ukraine is the parliament. You can criticize it, but there is no other.” He says this is a placeholder government that will be gone in three to four months, once a new president is elected on May 25. Judging by the reaction in the crowd, the question is will it even last that long. What is clear is that for all its self-discipline and organization, the Maidan is reluctant to delegate power to politicians. This is dangerous.

The crowd is just as dismissive of Arseny Yatseniuk, who has been nominated for prime minister in what he calls a “kamikaze” government, because of the unpopular reforms it will have to pass in the following few weeks. The man whose name gets heckled most is Arsen Avakov, the interior minister. Vladimir Parasyuk, one of the leaders of the Maidan self-defense forces, speaks up: “As a citizen of Ukraine, I won’t allow this. My conscience won’t let me, because Avakov should have jailed all the criminals from day one.” He says the interim government had one night to decide who will become the new interior minister, but it must present a new candidate to Maidan. (Avakov got appointed anyway.) “Maidan will not disperse,” Parasyuk says. “We will be a controlling organ, and they should know that if they betray us, we will come for each of them on behalf of our comrades—the heroes of Ukraine.”

In the evening I meet former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili in the lobby of my hotel. I’ve known Saakashvili since 2003. Over a glass of Georgian wine, we talk about the situation in Ukraine. Russia will now grab Crimea, and then move along the Black Sea coast to Transnistria, he tells me as though this has been long decided. Having watched Russia invade his own country in August 2008, a war that ended with occupation of the Georgian separatist territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Saakashvili is well placed to draw conclusions. I go back to my room and start redrafting the ending of my article.

February 27

I am sitting in my hotel room proofreading a briefing for the Economist when the news comes that armed men have seized the local administration building in Simferopol, the regional capital of Crimea. At the same time, Russian President Vladimir Putin has called a massive military exercise on the Ukrainian border. The facts are still very hazy—nobody knows who the armed men in Simferopol are, but they are clearly acting in Russia’s interest.

When I turn on Russia’s main television channel, it seems surprisingly well-prepared, providing a coherent pro-Kremlin narrative: A monument to the Soviet soldier-liberator has been vandalized in Ukraine; neo-Nazis have seized power in Kyiv; Russian officials are paying a visit to Israel, stressing Russian-Israeli ties; a historian from the Holocaust Museum talks about Western Ukrainian Nazi collaborators during World War II; people in Crimea have staged a protest against the fascist threat emanating from Kyiv and clashed with Crimean Tatars; unknown people have seized the parliament of Crimea. The news bulletin ends with an explainer, illustrated by infographics, about Crimea itself: It says the peninsula is dominated by an ethnic Russian population, has always been part of Russia, was only transferred to Ukraine by the “voluntary” decision of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev back in 1954 and has been neglected by Ukraine since.

In the evening I fly to Simferopol in Crimea. The tiny Saab aircraftis full of journalists. Hotels are booked, and taxi drivers at the airport are demanding three or four times the normal price. Cash machines are only disbursing 500 hryvnia (less than $50) at a time. A colleague from the Wall Street Journal and I decide to share a taxi from the airport. We are almost the last ones out of the building. A young airport taxi driver agrees to take us to the center of Simferopol for 350 hryvnia. His name is Vova, and he does not give away much: The situation is calm but tense; the roads are open, but there is a checkpoint on the road to Sevastopol (where my colleague needs to go); Vova could take him, but it will cost $100.

The main (and only decent) hotel in Simferopol is sold out—heaving with journalists. Vova shows entrepreneurial spirit, calling around to find me a room in the Yerevan Hotel, owned by an Armenian family. It’s an opulent marble and stained-glass affair with a sauna in the basement, no desk in the bedroom and a great young cook in the restaurant. It is not entirely clear who this vision of luxury is meant for, but I feel lucky to have a warm and clean room for $60on the outskirts of depressing, dusty and rundown Simferopol.

I’ve been to Simferopol many times but never spent a night here. When I was growing up in the Soviet Union, Crimea was the place my parents took us on holiday in the summer. We would arrive in Simferopol, where the airport was little more than a hangar. Passengers scrambled for their bags dumped on the ground. From there, we would make the two-hour journey, usually by trolley bus, over the mountain range to Yalta and the Black Sea coast. We would stay in Foros, a beautiful resort town on the coast blessed with a 200-year-old park not far from where Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was imprisoned by the KGB during the failed 1991 coup. There were only two snags. One was that the park and the nicest beaches in the area were officially closed to ordinary folk like us; they were part of a fenced-in territory that belonged to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. There were several ways of sneaking into the park: One was to find a hole in a fence; another was to climb over a balustrade (though it was occasionally covered in something black and sticky, like crude oil, to keep people like us away); the third way was to pretend you were entitled to be there (hard for an 8-year-old).

The other snag was the shortage of food. Meat was almost impossible to come by. Frankfurters, which smelled oddly of fish, were delivered to the town twice a week and required hours of standing in line. My mother cooked them with tomatoes and garlic—to kill the taste, as she later told me. We mostly survived on milk, kefir (fermented milk), biscuits, bread, potatoes and vegetables. Still, it was great fun. Getting into the park added a sense of adventure. The shortage of food was amply compensated for by the nighttime party on the beach, where the grown-ups cooked freshly caught mussels, built campfires and drank cheap Crimean wine.

In the evenings we would all sneak into the park, climb a tree and watch a movie shown in an open-air cinema for the Party privileged, the nomenklatura. I remember those men well. They strolled the lanes of the park planted for the 19 th-century Russian aristocracy and stared into the ponds stocked with goldfish, presumably while thinking about the fate of socialism. They wore light trousers that looked like pajama bottoms and cheap versions of panama hats. They were served special meals and cold kefir before bedtime with a piece of dark chocolate. To many a party apparatchik, Crimea was the ultimate paradise. To millions of Soviet citizens, too, Crimea was a place of summer holiday happiness. When the Soviet Union fell apart, no place inspired so much nostalgia as Crimea did. It is precisely this nostalgia that—23 years after the Soviet collapse—Vladimir Putin is now acting on as he moves to annex the peninsula and return the lost dream to the Russians. Unlike the Soviet men in pajama bottoms, who had a sense of restraint partly because of their memory of World War II, the Kremlin is behaving recklessly.

February 28

By the time I wake up in the morning, the airport in Simferopol has been taken over by armed men. All flights are canceled. I go to have a look at the airport. Well-equipped, professional-looking soldiers with automatic weapons are walking out front. They don’t answer any questions and make no eye contact when spoken to. They have no insignias on their uniforms, which are identical to the ones used by the Russian army. Local plainclothes thugs are “helping” them to keep people away from the airport buildings.

Soldiers, who were wearing no identifying insignia and declined to say whether they were Russian or Ukrainian, patrol outside the Simferopol International Airport on February 28, 2014. | Getty Images

In the center of Simferopol I pass small demonstrations of middle-aged and elderly people. Even though I’m a native Russian speaker, I am immediately taken for a “spy,” I guess because of the questions I ask. In front of the local parliament a man in fatiguesexplains to a small group of demonstrators, “If we don’t unite, NATO is going to bomb us.” Everyone is talking about the threat that “fascists” pose to the Russian-speaking population in Crimea, how these fascists are going to come and burn them alive. The “enemy”—a creation of Russian television, which is universally watched in Crimea—is virtual and therefore easily demonized.

A couple people in the crowd agree to offer their views on Ukrainian politicians: “[Vitali] Klitschko [a boxer-turned-parliamentarian] is a German agent. Yulia Tymoshenko [the former prime minister] is in cahoots with an English peer whose son married her daughter. Yatseniuk, the current prime minister, is a yid sponsored by American rabbis.” I recall an essay by Yuri Levada, the late Russian sociologist who was the first to note the persistence of homo Sovieticus, long after the end of the Soviet Union. These protesters in Crimea with their obscurantism, aggression, mistrust, hatred and anti-Americanism are perfect exhibits of the “Soviet Man” Levada wrote about—all the more so, in fact, for being frozen in time and conserved here on the peninsula, which has seen no development since the end of the Soviet Union and the advent of Ukraine’s tumultuous, impoverished independence. Nostalgia for the USSR is rife here, just as it is in Russia, and as I walk through the crowd, a middle-aged bespectacled woman working as a DJ is playing old Soviet songs from the 1950s.

Next stop is the Crimean Mejlis, a representative body of Crimean Tatars, the indigenous Turkic people of the peninsula who were deported from their homeland here by Stalin in 1944 and returned only at the end of the Soviet rule. Today, they make up some 13 percent of Crimea’s 2 million people—the 13 percent that is definitely not clamoring for a Russian takeover. Refat Chubarov, the chairman of the mejlis, a strong-faced and dignified-looking man in his late 50s, does not mince his words: Russia has committed an act of aggression. “This is the annexation of Crimea through a putsch,” he says. Chubarov is right, of course. The Kremlin has staged a putsch according to a recipe book from the middle of the last century: It found local gangsters (the nickname of Crimea’s new prime minister is “Goblin”), installed them as a government and now is making them ask for Russia’s “help.” The Soviet Union had done the same thing: in 1956 in Hungary, in 1968 in Czechoslovakia and in 1979 in Afghanistan. I’ve read a lot about such events, but I never thought I would live through one of them.

Vova and I drive next to a Ukrainian military base just outside Simferopol where in Soviet times they used to train diversanty—special units that could be parachuted into enemy territory to stage the kind of operations now under way in Crimea. The base certainly does not seem to be on high alert—children run around, officers stand by the gate smoking. There is no sense of panic. But on the approach backto Simferopol, we come across an armored personnel carrier with Russian plates. It drives slowly along the road, as though making a statement simply by being there.

March 1

Along with Andrew Higgins from the New York Times, a longtime friend and colleague, Vova and I drive next to Sevastopol, some 80 miles south of Simferopol, stopping in Bakhchisaray on the way. Bakhchisaray is a legendary place—the former capital of the Crimean Khanate from the 16th to the 18th century (when Russia conquered Crimea)—and a city long celebrated by Russian poets like Pushkin The 16 th-century palace of the khan is still intact, and I wander around its empty grounds, including a museum I often visited as a child. By the entrance an elderly woman, a Crimean Tatar, sells homemade chebureki, a sealed pastry envelope with juicy meat inside. Her name is Shekure Mamutova, she says, and she was born in Crimea in 1933 and deported with her parents to Uzbekistan when she was 11. “They gave us 15 minutes to pack up, and we traveled for 18 days in cattle carriages with no heating or food,” she tells me. “I would not wish it on my enemies. We don’t want war.”

A woman sells snacks outside the main gate of the Khan's Palace on March 9, 2014. | Getty Images

A few hundred meters away, in a local mejlis, men are smoking and discussing the news on television. Akhtem Chiygoz, a charismatic local leader in his 40s, says he has instructed Crimean Tatars to organize groups to monitor the situation and prevent provocations. These are not self-defense units yet, he explains—not until he had distributed weapons to them. Asked how many weapons he has, he smiles. “Don’t worry—we have what we need.”

We carry on to Sevastopol. Some 30 miles from the city we come across a checkpoint run by a pro-Russian Cossack self-defenseunit. A sign written on a concrete block painted as a Russian tricolor reads, “Where we are is Russia.” A black billboard with red lettering explains: “Russia has always been a graveyard for evil ideas. You cannot win over a graveyard, you can only stay in it—forever.” I try to talk to the men who put up the signs, but as soon as they learn that I am a foreign journalist, they turn their backs on me.

A pro-Russian militant and member of the 'Night Wolves' biker club helps man a checkpoint next to a sign that reads: 'Where we are, there is Russia' on a road leading to Sevastopol in Crimea on March 2, 2014. | Getty Images

Once we get to Sevastopol, I meet a senior officer from the Ukrainian naval fleet. He is on his way to the headquarters. “It feels like the22nd of June 1941,” he tells me grimly—the day when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. Ukrainian soldiers are demoralized. There is a lot of disinformation about officers switching sides and changing flags. Russia started moving troops around withinCrimea immediately after the Sochi Olympics, he says. In fact, some of the paratroopers now roaming the peninsula—up to 7,000 men—came to Crimea directly from their security duty in Sochi. The Ukrainian military has decided not to shoot but will not surrender either. They are waiting for instructions from Kyiv, and Kyiv is silent.

A pro-Russian supporter waves a Russian flag in front of pro-Russian armed men in military fatigues blocking the base of the Ukrainian frontier guards, in Balaklava, a small city not far from Sevastopol, on March 1, 2014.

We head from Sevastopol to the customs post at Balaklava Bay. The entrance to the bay is blocked by 10 military personnel trucks with Russian license plates and five armored vehicles with mounted machine guns. Each truck holds some 30 masked men with automatic rifles, who do not respond to questions. Two military ambulances are parked next to them, and two Russian Orthodox priests stand nearby holding a large cross. A small crowd of perhaps two dozen local people wave Russian flags.

Vova drives along a back road that takes us into the bay, which is backed by the mountains. It is a picturesque and historically important site: This is where the British light cavalry charged against the Russian forces during the Crimean War in 1854, and got destroyed—the famous Charge of the Light Brigade. The bay was also home to the Soviet nuclear submarine; a tunnel in a rock where the sub was hidden looks like a set from a Bond movie. A large and detailed diagram hangs on a wall over the tunnel: “A scheme for repair and concealment of nuclear submarines (as of 1962).”

In the evening I attend a concert on the main square of Sevastopol. People are celebrating their liberation from a phantom enemy. They wave Russian flags and dance along to cheerful Cossack songs, a Soviet-era pop group and the Black Sea Fleet choir singing about saving the “Great Russian city of Sevastopol.” “We are so happy the Russians soldiers are here. They are our defenders,” says a couple holding a baby. They are waving Russian flags and celebrating victory. Nobody can say where the enemy is.

March 2

I get a call from a contact inside the Ukrainian naval fleet headquarters. He tells me that the entrances to their base are now blocked by aggressive-looking plainclothes goons commonly known in Ukraine as titushki—sporty thugs for hire. I go to have a look. The men, some in fatigues, tell me they are here to stop provocations. At the same time, a couple of them start climbing the fence to put a banner over the gate: “Sevastopol without fascism.” A heavily made-up woman—either drunk or on drugs and barely standing—tells me her son is inside the base with no food or drink, so she has brought him some water and biscuits. She has lobbed these over the fence, and they remain lying on the ground, untouched. The thugs push her toward me, so that I can interview her.

Before I leave Crimea, I talk to my contact at the naval fleet headquarters in Sevastopol. He is obviously worried, but there is something new in his voice—a kind of resolve that was not there two days ago. It is clear that he and his officers will stand to the end, and so will the others. As an ethnic Russian officer serving in the Ukrainian fleet told the Russian who tried to take over his boat: “Russians do not surrender.”

They are not the only ones. Vova, who drives me back to Sevastopol, is a man transformed. Over past few days he turned out to be an invaluable fixer, resourceful driver and thoughtful interlocutor. He regularly called me in the evening to report the number of military trucks and armor he had seen on the road, giving me their exact locations and full description. As we drive back to Sevastopol, we talk about what awaits Crimea and Russia’s aggression. It turns out Vova is following the events with great interest and sensibility. Unlike many people in Crimea, he understands full well that Russians are not here to protect him from a phantom threat. He has no interest in joining Russia.

March 4

I decide to leave Crimea and go to Donetsk, in Eastern Ukraine, where I fear Russia might strike next. It has been the scene of clashes between pro-Russian separatists and the local police, who are trying to maintain a semblance of order. As I fly there via Kyiv, I meet an interesting character—a fixer from Batkivshchyna, the political party led by Yulia Tymoshenko. His job is to clear the way for the arrival of Serhiy Taruta, a business tycoon whom the acting government in Kyiv has just installed as Donetsk’s governor to stabilize the situation there. He briefs me on the balance of power among various police and criminal groups, and it becomes clear that there is no real difference between them. It also becomes clear that the governor has to rely on them to maintain peace. My new acquaintance offers me a ride to the center of town in his car. We make couple of circles around the airport terminal to ensure that we are not being followed, and then go the local administration building, the scene of pro-Russian protests.

The leader of the protest is a young man named Pavel Gubarev, from a fringe Russian nationalistic organization. He and his comrades have managed to get inside the administration building and hang a Russian flag on top of it. Over the course of the two and a half days that I am in Donetsk, the flag changes five times—from Russian to Ukrainian and back again.

A pro-Russian protester raises his fist as he shouts slogans during a rally in the industrial Ukrainian city of Donetsk on March 1, 2014. | Getty Images

A grim-looking and quite aggressive crowd of Gubarev’s supporters is trying to mimic the protests of the previous weeks in Kyiv’s Maidan, but this is different. Not once did I feel threatened on the Maidan by protesters. Until the final showdown, it was in many ways the safest place in Kyiv. Here, surrounded by aggressive men in black leather jackets demanding that I show them my journalist credentials or my passport, I feel much more uncomfortable.

In the evening I attend a different protest just few hundred meters away, by the church of St. Michael the Archangel. The pro-Ukraine crowd could hardly be more different—the open-faced, thoughtful, friendly young people seem to have come from a different planet. They talk about dignity and pride for the Ukrainian soldiers in Crimea as Ukrainian flags fly overhead. “Volodya [Putin], stay at home—I don’t need your protection,” one banner says. They sing Ukraine’s national anthem—a true act of bravery in Donetsk.

I strike up a conversation with a young woman, Yulia Kubanova, who is holding her own banner saying, “Ukraine is United.” Kubanova tells me she is 28 years old and works for an advertising agency. She went to school in 1992, a year after Ukraine became an independent country. “My mother was born in Russia, and my father was born in Ukraine,” she explains. “I never asked myself whether I am Russian or Ukrainian.I am a Ukrainian citizen. My parents voted for Ukrainian independence in 1991, but now my mom says she want to go back to Russia. I ask her why, and she tells me, “Because the salaries there are higher. But I am proud of my country, where people know what dignity is.” She supported the protesters in the Maidan. After the Feb. 19 shootings there, she went to lay flowers for the victims in front of a statue of the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko. “A middle-aged woman came up to me and asked me why I was crying,” Kubanova recalls. “I told her. She hit me and called me a Nazi and a whore.”

March 6

After two weeks on the road, I am back home in Moscow, where the atmosphere is scarily relaxed and euphoric. The propaganda pouring out of the television channels is overshadowing any sign of dissidence. Putin’s approval rating is soaring, and Moscow seems to be in some sort of psychosis.

March 13

There are reports that Russia is massing troops on the border with Eastern Ukraine. In Moscow the last remaining pockets of independent media are getting steamrolled. The editor of Lenta.ru, the most popular news site in Russia and one that has excelled in independent analysis and reporting, has been fired and replaced by a pro-Kremlin stooge. This is the action of the private owner acting on the Kremlin’s instructions. The Kremlin has also shut down access to the blogs of prominent opposition figures—Alexei Navalny and Garry Kasparov. It feels as though Russia is about to go to war.

March 15

A large anti-war demonstration in Moscow. Some 20,000 people turn up. There are a lot of familiar faces in the crowd—this is almost entirely a Moscow intelligentsia demonstration, and journalists are here not to report but to protest.

In the afternoon, I go to a concert at a children’s venue on Sparrow Hills, in which my kids perform. It is organized by Sergei Nikitin, a wonderful Russian artist who sets poetry to music. Sergei,70, is an old family friend. I grew up listening to his songs—they were a rare benevolent example of Soviet culture in the 1970s, a diversion from the official propaganda. They marked out the territory of private life, where the state ended and family began. They made breathing easier, feelings purer. Incredibly, after all these years, they still have the same effect—an antidote to the poisonous vapors generated by today’s state propaganda, which is far more aggressive than the Soviet version. My three children come onstage to play and sing a song written by my grandfather, a composer. It is called “Pust Vsegda Budet Solntse”—“Let There Always Be Sunshine.”

Protesters carry Ukrainian and Russian flags in Moscow on March 15, 2014, during a rally against recent Russia's move on Crimea. | Getty Images

It was, and still is, one of the most famous songs in the Soviet Union, one that every child knew. My grandfather wrote it in 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Cold War came so close to a nuclear one. It was an anti-war song, with lines like, “We will stand against war and against grief—happiness and sunshine must overcome.” It is not just the seriousness with which my 6-year-old daughter now sings it (helped by her 2-year-old sister) and the gusto with which my 8-year-old son accompanies them on the piano. It is the whole atmosphere of the concert and the anti-war rally outside that make me and many others in the audience choke. I look at Nikitin—tears are rolling down his face. The audience falls completely silent. A cute children’s performance turns into something far more significant. It is a moment of extraordinary truth and simplicity. Nikitin struggles to control his voice as he takes up the microphone. “I think that if these girls sang this song at that anti-war rally which is happening at the moment, perhaps even the thick-headed war hawks would pause.” I look around at the audience, full of good, open-hearted and unspoiled children—five, six, seven, eight years old. And I feel incredible anger rising inside me—anger at Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, who are stealing these children’s future, making them hostages to Russia’s cynical and reckless policies. One other scary thought strikes me: When my grandfather wrote this song, the fear of a nuclear winter was real and tactile. The scariest thing today is that this fear is gone.

March 16

I fly back to Kharkiv, where there were violent clashes just yesterday. At least one person has died. I meet up with Chris Chivers of the New York Times, one of the smartest war reporters and most talented writers I know. I think the last time I saw him was in Georgia, during the 2008 war with Russia. It feels as though there is a short cut between the two crises. What about everything in between, I wonder.

A pro-Russian demonstration starts at midday by Lenin’s statue, under the banner “Our Motherland is USSR.” Unlike three weeks ago, however, the whole thing seems much more choreographed. After a group of pensioners briefly demands a referendum of their own on the status of Kharkiv, some 1,000 people cross the main square toward the regional administration building, where they are faced with three lines of shielded police officers in riot gear.

With cameras rolling, protesters unfold a Russian flag more than 300 feet long, and chant, “Russia” and “Putin.” A couple dozen thuggish men in tracksuits lead a charge against the police line. A couple of shields are wrestled from the police—then returned almost with an apology. In between the police line and the thugs stand several plainclothes men, who appear to be there for the express purpose of stage-managing the clash. Then, as though by a turn of the switch, the protesters move toward the Russian consulate, where they ask Russia to interfere, and then on to the Polish consulate, where they tell the West to stay away. It is an extraordinary piece of street theater, carefully timed and staged for the benefit of television cameras, with ordinary people acting as extras. The show culminates with the storming of the building that houses Ukrainian nationalist organizations and the burning of their literature.

Pro-Russian supporters carry a huge Russian flag during a rally in Kharkiv, on March 16, 2014.

Yet, by 7 p.m. the whole set piece is over. The “protesters” have gone home, and the police line outside the regional administration building has thinned down to half a dozen men. As Russian television channels report “ongoing” troubles in Kharkiv, the city goes to sleep.

Earlier that day, I had gone to see Gennady Kernes, the Kharkiv mayor, who was supposedly under nighttime house arrest. (He has long abandoned Yanukovych). Kernes told me to come to the Hotel National, which he owns and where he resides. I walked into an empty, dark lobby and was quickly ushered into what appeared to be a restaurant hall. Kernes was sitting by himself at a table covered in medicine—dozens and dozens of sprays, drops, tablets, mixtures and ointments. (“He really cares about his health,” one of his assistants told me later). In front of Kernes was a plate of sliced oranges, which he was eating while flipping through his iPad. On a nearby television screen, Russian channel was reporting on the orderly referendum in Crimea and its now very predictable results.

The whole rally, Kernes told me, was just an “illusion creation” that can later be used as a justification for Russia’s actions. His job, he explained, is to spoil that illusion.

Asked if he would accept Russian troops moving into Kharkiv, he answered with a rude gesture and a scathing look: “My father is buried here. What are you talking about?”

I go to dinner with Chivers and two of his colleagues, who have been to the Ukrainian border. Chris says Ukrainian soldiers do not look as though they are preparing for action. After a sumptuous supper of Georgian food, wewalk back to Kharkiv Palace, our glitzy Dubai-style hotel. All of a sudden, it starts to snow. We pass the administration building—now deserted—and the giant of statue of Lenin, who is pointing his arm to the future, or perhaps the past.

March 17

I fly back to Kyiv. The city seems to have consolidated in the face of Russia’s aggression in Crimea. The government has called for general mobilization. I go to a local military commission, where people come to enlist for military service. I meet Denis Shevlyakov, a 46-year-old Russian -speaker. “I dodged military service in the Soviet Union. I never thought I would volunteer to fight for Ukraine,” he tells me. The reason for this, he says is that Ukraine’s capital has become a nation over the past four weeks. Kyiv does indeed seem to have united. Still, I ask one taxi driver if he would be prepared to go to fight for Donetsk in the east. “Probably not for Donetsk,” he says. I ask him where, then, Ukraine really starts and ends for him. “I am not really sure,” he says.