"A group of ... aggressive people got out on the streets of Donetsk, and some seemed to be local, others had accents that seemed to ID them as Russian. They seemed to be from Russian cities like Rostov. They came out and put out Russian flags; they took down Ukrainian flags. They surrounded the district council building, and they stormed the building. ... [They] wanted to make this man Pavel Gubarev mayor. People were shouting 'Russiya!' and started taking down Ukrainian flags."

UP9/Wikimedia
Apparently, no one told them governments don't run on Capture the Flag rules.

Our source knew plenty of people who wound up supporting the separatist cause, including the guy who pulled their national flag down from the council building. A month or two before, these people had all just been her fellow citizens. In less time than it takes to earn an Introduction to Psychology credit, their political differences had made the leap from amiable disagreements to people dying in the streets.

"There was a meeting of some pro-Ukrainian people, a demonstration on the 13th of March in the central square. A big fight broke out, because at one point ... a young boy was severely cut. The kid died of the stab wound."

Stringer/Reuters
People were jump-kick angry before; what do you think happened after?

That just looks like a normal picture of a civic disturbance. Something that could've come from Occupy Wall Street or the protests in Ferguson. But in this case, it was the first battle of a civil war. In less than two months, the situation in Ukraine escalated to armies in the field and artillery pounding neighborhoods. None of the dozens of people we spoke with across three cities expressed anything but disbelief about this. The most common sentence we heard was:

"It's like a bad dream."

We arrived, by accident, on Ukraine's Independence Day. A good half of the men out on the street were in some form of uniform. Some of them were young, fit, wearing new uniforms with official-looking insignia. Others were potbellied middle-aged men wearing pieces of various uniforms and, generally, drinking (in their defense, we've literally never been sober on July 4th).

Magenta Vaughn
And when you're fighting for freedom, technically every day's Independence Day.

Our first assumption is that these young, fit, disciplined-looking men (and women!) were clearly the sort of regular army soldiers actually doing the fighting. The random creepy uncles wearing digicam trousers and sandals had just joined some volunteer battalion so they could get laid. The first soldiers we saw at a checkpoint on our way to the front seemed to back this up. They had nice uniforms, full body armor, and weapons all over their bodies. Our interpreter pointed out that they might've actually been cops. Apparently, there's not much of a line between the two in a warzone.

And then we actually got near the front, and most of the soldiers were those middle-aged potbellied dudes. They manned checkpoints and guarded vital targets and patrolled the streets. We met one group of partisan volunteers at a destroyed bridge.

Magenta Vaughn
A literal bridge to nowhere.

They were close enough to the rebels that we couldn't use GPS -- it didn't know where their checkpoints were. The colonel in charge of the city of Avdiivka was a full-bellied man in mismatched camo pants and a very tight camouflage T-shirt. Remember this guy, from earlier?

Magenta Vaughn
If not, you've been drinking more than him.

He was actually perfectly lucid and basically sober: This was his one beer after duty. He wouldn't even let me buy him a second. No explanation for the lack of undershirt, though. That's on him.

On the train back to Kiev, we met a middle-aged sniper being rotated away from the front lines after more than a year. He gave an answer that was common among these older volunteer warriors.

"I volunteered so that my sons wouldn't have to fight."

Magenta Vaughn
He'd give those kids the shirt off his back.

We wound up sharing a couple beers and a whiskey-filled glass pig with him. Then he took his shirt off and showed us that kick-ass belt buckle. He was pretty rad.

If you live in the suburbs, imagine the city nearest to you seceded from the United States. Suddenly Houston is a battleground, but, s**t, you still need to go there -- you might even work there. That doesn't change just because some fools with cannons happen to be blasting the s**t out of the Jamba Juice.

We spoke with one woman in Konstantinivka who worked in Donetsk, heart of the rebel movement and also a 20-minute drive away. She commuted across the front line every day to work. Further, her office happened to be near Donetsk airport, site of one of the war's most vicious battles. She was wounded in the arm by rocket shrapnel while working her day job -- as a freaking accountant.

Magenta Vaughn
Her day started in the black and ended in her red.

She still works there. She spends around $20 a week (a lot more money than it sounds in Eastern Ukraine) on travel. Meanwhile, separatist civilians who live over in Donetsk would cross over on a regular basis to use the ATMs. Trucks full of enemy soldiers rolled by while civilians stood in line to grab their week's cash and then sneak back across the border.

Magenta Vaughn
Warzones don't tend to take debit cards.

Another source, who drove us through the military checkpoints and up to Avdiivka, reported being arrested as well, but by the Ukrainian government. The rebels briefly took over his home city. It was retaken in a month, and as a self-defense measure some of the men who'd collaborated with the brief rebel government turned him in as a sympathizer to allay suspicion from themselves.

This happened to him three times.

When we were near the front, the Ukrainian military had forbidden pictures of their checkpoints and defenses, out of fear that separatist artillery would use the geodata to target bombardments. We were expressly forbidden from taking pictures of any of the emplacements as a result.

Alcohol and drugs are a big distraction, too: Remember that sniper from earlier, the one we met on the train? After drinking a glass pig filled with whiskey with him ...

And this little piggy got a DUI on the way home.

... he gave us a thumb drive with all of his war pictures and music (a lot of 3 Doors Down, to be honest). It included pictures of him with his gigantic, terrifying rifle:

Which absolutely stopped any chance of us calling him out on the 3 Doors Down thing.

But also this:

We asked him what the f**k was going on here, and he explained that the bottle set up there was a crude field bong they'd crafted to smoke marijuana with. He would only say that the weed came from "volunteers." He added:

"I've seen young guys old enough to be my sons, scared ... and when they smoke, they are still afraid, but they can function. With alcohol they cannot function."

In other words: If you can't stop your volunteer militia from getting fucked up in the field, better they be stoned than drunk. If there's only one message you ever take away from a Cracked article, make it that one.

Robert Evans has a Twitter. He thanks Jim Kovpak for translating. Check out Jim's blog about Russia!

For more insider perspectives, check out 6 Insane Things You Learn Overthrowing Your Own Government and 5 Survival Lessons From Inside A Real-World Dystopia.

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