Mobs rule eastern Ukraine

His mistake was to run from the advancing mob, and that was enough for the men and women carrying clubs, knives and swords through Donetsk’s Lenin district. They set upon him. Beaten and bloodied, the unidentified man was saved, in a manner, by militiamen who dragged him through the crowd under metal shields, bundled him into the back of a car and drove him off at speed to an unknown fate. No one could say what he’d done; he was a ‘provocateur’, a term used by both sides of Ukraine’s increasingly bitter divide to describe the other, but in the rebel-held east it means only one thing – a supporter of the ‘Fascist’ government in Kiev. It was a brutal picture of the mob-rule that has descended upon this city in eastern Ukraine, the biggest to fall to an armed uprising against the government. Pro-Russian separatist leaders want a referendum on May 11 to declare Donetsk and the surrounding region an independent republic. Whatever the outcome, it won’t be recognised by Kiev. The anger unleashed in the process will prove hard to rebottle, and points to a state descending into dangerous disorder, potentially civil war. The deaths of more than 40 pro-Russian activists in a burning building during clashes in Black Sea port of Odessa on Friday have heightened the fear that the civil war was imminent, according to a news agency.