Anna Nemtsova is a correspondent for Newsweek and the Daily Beast based in Moscow. Her work has also appeared in the Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Foreign Policy, nbcnews.com, Al Jazeera, Marie Claire and the Guardian.

We were on the road headed out of Donetsk. It was just a few days after the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, and the deserted road to the Pervomayskoye region on the western outskirts of this mining capital-turned-war zone was bumpy and torn up by tanks. Every few yards there were huge gaps in the asphalt. Gunmen patrolled the roads while other gunmen dug trenches or hung out by mortar cannons. We drove by a couple of bombed rebel checkpoints where gloomy pro-Russian militia checked our documents. At one point, we passed by the blackened, burned remains of a gas station, where several cars had been turned inside out by explosions, as if they were made of paper.

Just two days earlier, we had seen the heartbreaking corpses of burned children from the shot-down Malaysia Air flight, the unlikely collateral damage of this fight between Ukraine and Russia and a region of 8 million people caught between them. Now we were on the road again, and there was more destruction and death—murder by Grad rockets, by mortar and by artillery fire on cities, towns and villages. At times, the scenes this week in the so-called People’s Republic of Donetsk seemed out of World War II. But as real as the carnage is, I still find it very hard to believe we are covering a real and bloody war here in Eastern Ukraine, amid placid fields of blood-red poppies and quiet concrete streetscapes.


My driver, Andrei Popov, a 49-year-old entrepreneur who has spent his life here in the mining region known as the Donbass, grew silent, then exclaimed loudly a short sentence spiced with Russian curses as he pointed at a public minibus badly damaged by shells—the day before he had seen a body covered with a blanket, a passenger from that bus. Our sense of dread worsened as he drove toward his dacha, just four kilometers outside Donetsk, and sure enough the worst of his expectations turned true: The whole small gated community of ramshackle summer cottages looked to have been shelled. Some houses had big holes in the walls, others were missing their roofs. The front wall of my guide’s house was damaged; we found two deep holes in his garden. Luckily, rebels had warned locals to evacuate the day before the fighting on Monday. “Otherwise my neighbors would have been killed, at least 80 percent of them,” Popov said. Then he cursed more as he walked along the road to make sure that no one was left under the ruins: “Is anybody here?” he shouted.

On the day Popov’s dacha got shelled, my colleagues and I had discovered a dead woman, two dead men and destroyed cars and buildings in the middle of Donetsk itself, along the heavily shelled Slavatskaya Street in the area between Donetsk’s railway and bus stations. The woman on the charred ground by a garage could have been my age, though it was hard to say. She was lying on her stomach; the shell had hit her head—it was missing. Her two black shoes, ripped off her feet by the explosion, landed next to each other by her head, as if they had continued to make hurried steps toward some shelter they did not find.

***

This is the war I have been covering since April, a war that few in the capitals of Europe and America paid much attention to, aside from the occasional hand-wringing over whether and how to sanction Russian President Vladimir Putin. On the ground, over five separate trips totaling a little more than five weeks, I’ve crisscrossed this unhappy patch of Eastern Ukraine, from Donetsk to Luhansk, Slovyansk to Kramatorsk, and many places in between. Much of it at one point or another has been part of the rebel-declared People’s Republic of Donetsk, and since intensive fighting broke out in mid-May an estimated 780 civilians and an unknown number of separatist fighters have been killed. That makes this war every bit as bloody as the conflict that has erupted over the last couple weeks in Gaza, but until the Malaysia Airlines plane fell from the sky, apparently shot down by the Russian-backed rebels among whom I’ve been traveling, it was far less covered. No one even wanted to call it a real war.

And all the more surreal, it’s a real war that has broken out in the midst of Donetsk, which in addition to being Ukraine’s mining capital, a city with a population of almost 1 million, is a very green city, where even today street workers cut and water beautiful grass lawns and endless flower beds of giant colorful roses. You could not imagine a less likely place for a civil war. Who, six months ago, could have dreamed of Soviet-era Sukhoi jets screeching overhead here, or Ukrainian pilots dropping bombs on their fellow citizens?

On the left, the author with New York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise, a day after the two were briefly abducted. On the right, a building damaged by shelling in Donetsk. | Left: Courtesy of Anna Nemtsova; right: AP Photo

Even in April it seemed crazy. Sure, I met many angry, bitter Russian-speaking locals then, who were suspicious of the “Ukrainian nationalists” who had toppled the government back in Kyiv and vowed to turn the country toward Europe and out of Putin’s sphere of influence. And there was no question that violence was being incited by Muscovites, who make up the rebel republic’s leadership, and Russian ideologists, who fan the flames with their calls to create a “Novorossia”—New Russia—out of the entire region. The defense minister of the People’s Republic, Col. Igor Girkin, quit the Russian successor to the KGB, known as the FSB, only last May. The Donetsk People’s Republic’s prime minister, Alexander Borodai, is a former Moscow journalist and analyst. Another Moscow brain, Borodai’s security adviser, Sergei Kavtaradze, studied military history and wrote an academic thesis on civil wars. But even the Russian annexation of the nearby Crimean Peninsula, as much of a jolt as that was, hadn’t led to a real war. Why would this be different?

***

The first time I witnessed violence in the Donbass, I was shocked by how quickly it caught fire. It was May 1, International Workers Day, traditionally celebrated in some post-Soviet countries by a peaceful demonstration. Families in their best clothes, many holding their children’s hands, waving Russian, Communist and Donetsk People’s Republic flags and balloons, came out to Donetsk’s Lenin Square to hear speeches about “fascist Kyiv” and the upcoming people’s referendum that would liberate the Donbass from Ukraine’s authority. People’s Republic leaders called on the crowd of a couple thousand people to “accurately” walk and take over the central police station and then, also “accurately,” take over the city prosecutor’s building.

The police station did not take much effort—protesters just put their separatist flags on the front wall—but the prosecutors did not surrender easily. Shielded police officers were waiting for the demonstrators at the entrance. It took only a few minutes for the battle to start in earnest: Police fired rubber bullets, smoke and stun grenades at the angry crowd, protesters instantly took apart the pavement and threw bricks at police. One of the women in the crowd—her red blouse messed up, lipstick smeared, still with balloons in her hand—was hit with a rubber bullet on the forehead. I told her that it was probably time to take her son away and go to see a doctor. “No, we have to finish what we started,” she yelled, and grabbed another brick.

A few days later, on May 8, more than 40 people, mostly pro-Russian demonstrators, were killed in a horrific fire in the House of Professional Unions in Odessa. That was the turning point in the rising hate for millions of Russian speakers and pro-Kremlin Russians living in Ukraine. The rhetoric immediately jumped from “they don’t make Russian an official language” to “see, now they burn us.” That sad week, I came to write about funerals in Odessa. In vain, I tried to find a pair of friends or lovers who could still converse about their different opinions of the tragic clashes. But opponents were not able to talk with one another, to look in each other’s eyes.

By the end of May, when I returned again, it had become a real war. How, I wondered as the whole place unraveled, can schoolteachers or students buy gas, pour it into a bottle, and burn people? Or take a brick and throw it into a human head?

The chemistry of violence can be studied and explained, Sergei Kavtaradze, one of the Muscovites behind the Donetsk People’s Republic, told me this week, the week of the Flight 17 airplane catastrophe. Kavtaradze would know: He wrote his Ph.D. thesis about modern civil wars, their causes, inspirations and escalation. “It all starts from close contact: somebody who pours gas in a bottle and throws it at his opponent, or takes a stick with a nail protruding out of it, and hits his enemy with it, finds it not difficult to take a Kalashnikov next,” Kavtaradze explained. And what is next, I ask? He rolls a tank over a human body, shoots Grad rockets at residential areas or Buk missiles at a passenger airplane full of innocents?

Medical workers and pro-Russian activists unload the bodies of killed pro-Russian fighters from a truck, in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, on May 27, 2014. | Getty Images

Our conversation did not exactly give me hope that the terrible tragedy of the downed plane would somehow halt the fighting. “If Ukraine does not leave Donbass, in a month both sides will go deeper into the war to an awful degree that would be a threat to Europe. The world needs to pay attention to it,” Kavtaradze warned.

***

Looking back at every page of this war, I realize that I’ve covered a series of the most absurd and insane nightmares. To me, day one of the real war was the day of heavy fighting for Donetsk airport, on May 27. About 100 pro-Russian rebels and “volunteers from Russia” were killed that day, marking the beginning of the anti-terrorist operation declared by Ukraine’s newly elected President Petro Poroshenko.

Later, when the city morgue at Kalininskaya Hospital filled up with separatist bodies, leaders of the rogue republic invited us reporters to accompany a truck with 31 red coffins traveling that day to the Russian border, carrying with it a dark message to the Kremlin that hundreds more corpses would soon follow. Their dark message dissolved in a vacuum of silence and secrecy once it crossed the border. Russian state television did not say a word about Russian bodies arriving home; wives of “volunteer” guerrillas—most of them apparently recruited over a Russian social network called Vkontakte.ru—had trouble even finding their husband’s bodies. Russia was clearly both spurring the war on and eager to avoid the evidence of it.

As the fighting has unfolded, most of the rebels I have spoken with are locals from the Donbass. They did not want their lives to have anything to do with pro-Western Ukraine. They believed they were fighting to defend their land from Kyiv's “fascists.” Twice gunmen among these rebels have detained me, both times taking me away in some unknown direction, which felt more like abduction, without telling my colleagues and me where they were taking us, without giving us any chance to make a single phone call.

The first time, they took me and three of my colleagues to a town called Antratsit for several hours; the second time, just last week, they grabbed me and two other journalists at the city morgue, where we had gone to look for bodies of MH17 victims, and brought us to a Ukrainian Security Service base now controlled by separatists in Donetsk. During the few hours we spent with our interrogators, we learned how much they hated Americans. They were mostly young local guys from Sloviansk, a stronghold they lost to “backed by America Ukrainians” earlier this month. The commander who decided whether to arrest and put us in jail or let us go told us that his own house was destroyed by an American bomb. Rebels blame the West and especially America for not trying to understand why somebody genuinely wants to be with Russia, not because of Putin or the Kremlin but because Russia was more like a mother for them.

***

By mid-July, the death toll of civilians climbed to about 780 dead. Every night I woke up to the sound of Grad missiles or mortar shootings in the city of Donetsk. Was the war worth so many lives? How could it become a norm to fire rockets at residential areas? I kept asking in both Moscow and Kyiv. Irina Bekeshkina, director of the Democratic Initiatives Foundation in the Ukrainian capital, no hardline advocate of military action, told me it was just unavoidable. “This is a war Ukraine fights against Russia. If we don’t remove this poisonous Novorossia tumor now, it will cover the entire country with metastases and Ukraine dies,” Bikeshkina said. She was a pacifist by nature, but in this particular case the blood spilled in Donetsk was preventing more blood, she insisted.

A photo taken on July 16, when the civilian death toll was creeping toward 800, shows cars burnt out during the overnight combats between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian militants in the eastern Ukrainian city of Lugansk. | Getty Images

How far should Novorossia go, I asked Kremlin adviser Sergei Markov back in Moscow. “Our victorious plan is to first win the war in the Donbass, and go further to make Nikolayev, Kharkiv and Odessa part of Novorossia,” Markov told me, naming other cities in Eastern Ukraine. “On the big scale of things, we fight a war declared by the anti-Russian party in Washington, McCain, Biden and others dreaming to overthrowing Putin.”

In our conversation, Markov never pretended that the Moscow brain was not behind the war in the Donbass. About a month ago, he told me that the rebels’ priority was to make the sky over Donbass “uncomfortable” for Ukrainian airplanes. Shortly after that, rebels learned to shoot down Ukrainian Sukhoi jets, one after another, until, most probably, they shot down Flight 17 by accident.

But terror tactics and lies are not confined to one side or another in this war. The day after eight people were killed on Luhansk’s central square, I was discussing with my friend, New York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise, whether it was a Ukrainian jet or rebels that had been shooting at the square.

Kyiv denied it was a jet, but when we arrived and saw the scene with our own eyes, the picture was more than clear: At least 21 craters were left by the rockets shot from the air. Later, the Western observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe confirmed that rockets from a plane hit the square.

If Kyiv could lie to us once, why could not they lie again? I discussed that with a colleague from Human Rights Watch, Ole Solvang. Human Rights Watch documented at least four cases of Ukrainian forces being responsible for Grad unguided rockets falling on residential areas. “All evidence indicated that Ukrainian forces were behind Grad attacks,” Solvang told me, but when I called the interior and defense ministries of Ukraine, they claimed they were serious about protecting civilians and that they never used Grad rockets in the cities.

***

It’s not easy to talk about the war, even with close friends back in Kyiv. They never thought the Donbass would understand their revolution, the one that toppled Ukraine’s corrupt pro-Russian leader and attempted to set the country on a new pro-European course, and now, four months into the war, they admit they have no mercy for pro-Russian population. “I don’t feel sorry for them. … They kill our Ukrainian guys. This is war, and in war enemies die,” my good friend, a talented photographer named Maksim, told me.

Not long after I talked with Maksim on the phone from Kyiv, I took a walk around a deserted Donetsk this past Tuesday with Dmitry, a leader of a civil society group called Responsible Citizens. He and five close friends decided to create the group to build a bridge between Kyiv and Donetsk. But when the activists traveled to Kyiv and spoke with officials, they were told the most painful words—that the war was needed to renew the nation. And now Dima, as he is called, is pretty much alone in Donetsk. His friends have all run away from the bombs, beatings and kidnappings. And he is giving up on peace. “We lost our hope for Kyiv. Even if they win the war and come to Donetsk, it will take them ages to win our hearts back,” he told me, an observation that seemed indisputable in a city where headless bodies now lie on street corners and Dutch body parts rot in fields of sunflowers.