The Times
August 18, 2014 12:00AM

TRAVELLING across the no-man’s land between enemy lines towards Donetsk, away from the thundering artillery of the Ukrainian army, we drove straight into a reconnaissance unit of the Russian-backed separatist forces.

“Don’t move or we will blast your f. king heads off,” the militiamen screamed, faces twisted with fear, as they shoved Kalashnikov rifles through the open windows of our battered old Lada.

Petrified, I recalled the vehicles peppered with bullets we had just passed on a deserted road scarred with craters from shelling.

The commander who, like his four comrades, was in his mid-20s and dressed in military fatigues, inspected my journalistic accreditation — and then burst into tears.

Gripping my hand, he mumbled almost incoherently about how they had been caught up in artillery fire and about the chaos in their midst. The group seemed lost and disoriented, like many of the rebels I have encountered.

While all eyes have been on the Kremlin’s “humanitarian” convoy of 280 trucks, which has won permission to enter Ukraine — and on reports of a clash between Kiev’s forces and a separate column of Russian military vehicles — eastern Ukraine is moving *towards an endgame.

In the past few days, the rebels’ key political and military leaders, all of them Russian citizens, have resigned and fled back across the border in what looks increasingly like certain defeat by the Ukrainian army. Alexander Borodai, the Muscovite “prime minister” of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, has gone; so has his fellow Russian Valery Bolotov, who ran Lugansk. Most significant of all, Igor Girkin, nicknamed “Strelkov” (Shooter), the former Russian secret service operator who was the military commander of the Kremlin’s takeover of *Crimea in March and went on to lead the eastern Ukraine *rebellion, has returned home.

The remaining rebel-held territories are descending into anarchy, with the absence of law enforcement and now the removal of a command structure giving a free hand to motley groups of mercenaries, thugs, criminals and pro-Russian locals. Rebel checkpoints are turning rogue; marauding and abuse of *civilians is becoming commonplace.

The once-disciplined rebel fighters that frequent the terrace of our Donetsk hotel are now letting rip their assault rifles into the air during late-night drinking sessions “Our entire political and military command has left; as soldiers, we will stand our ground, but it is becoming hard,” said a Russian commander.

Just four months ago, Ukraine seemed on the verge of breaking up. After taking Crimea, Russian President Vladimir Putin looked set to repeat the strategy in east Ukraine. Putin spoke of NovoRossiya, or “new Russia”. Russian nationalist ideologists dreamt of reversing the “defeat of 1991” — the year the Soviet Union collapsed — and of the birth of Eurasia, a new Moscow-centred empire. But then the tide turned. Ukrainian oligarchs, supported by the government, set up volunteer battalions of former servicemen and activists from Kiev’s Maidan uprising, as well as criminals, neo-Nazis and foreign mercenaries.

Security forces commanders seen as pro-Russian were replaced and the country elected Petro Poroshenko, a pro-Western oligarch campaigning on an anti-Kremlin ticket, as the new President and commander-in-chief.

Poroshenko called Putin’s bluff and ordered a crackdown on the rebellion but Russian troops remained behind the borders.

This encouraged Ukrainian commanders to be brutal, relentlessly shelling rebel-held areas such as Lugansk, which is on the verge of a humanitarian disaster.

In the meantime, the separatist movement failed to rally enough support from local people, who, for all their grievances with Kiev, refused to volunteer en masse for a fratricidal war against their own government and are angry at the antics of the separatists.

Taking eastern Ukraine has proved a very different proposition from seizing Crimea. The cost would have been too high, *especially in the face of international isolation and sanctions.

The Poroshenko government faces a huge challenge in managing the fallout from a conflict that has killed more than 2000 people, destroyed homes, factories and infrastructure, and shrunk the economy by almost 5 per cent.

Thousands of local fighters will be left behind once the Russian mercenaries have been pushed back across the border. One is the commander of the lost rebel band that almost shot us. “Tell the world that the Ukrainians kill women and children, they are bombing them, they are monsters,” he sobbed, suddenly looking like a young man experiencing a nervous breakdown.

For him, and his counterparts on the other side of the front, it will be a long road to reconciliation