HORLIVKA, Ukraine — The rebel commander casually led the way down a muddy trench, shoulder high with shaved walls of moist earth, his boots slapping at wooden slabs sunk into the muck. Finally, he reached an earth-covered observation post.
“There, you see,” he said, pointing a gnarled index finger, its brown nail twisted after 30 years in the coal mines. A few hundred yards away, across an icy lake and a field, were some scattered office buildings, close enough to count the windowpanes.
“There are the Ukrainians,” said the commander, whose real name is Pavel and who asked that his surname not be used, for fear of reprisals. His fighters call him Batya, an endearment for father in Russian and a common nom de guerre for rebel commanders in eastern Ukraine.
The smack of artillery fire rose from a village in the valley below, captured just a few days earlier by Batya’s rebels. A nearby crack, a tense pause, then a distant thud somewhere beyond the lake.
“Sometimes, at night, they come at us with their tanks,” Batya said. “But we do not let them advance.”
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“Every time we move to a new town, there are new forms to fill out,” Batya said, suddenly smiling again.
After a brief tour of the front lines, he paused at one of his northernmost emplacements, just to check the temperature of his troops. An elderly woman was arguing angrily with a pair of soldiers who refused to let her through to buy bread, fearing she was a Ukrainian spy.
A few yards away, Ira smiled again shyly, cradling an automatic rifle across her chest. On its nose was a grenade launcher carrying a shell called the frog, because it hits the ground, jumps up and explodes at stomach level.
“I saw what happened in Maidan,” she said, referring to the popular uprising that had unseated the previous, pro-Russian government last year. “I knew I was against the people who had come to power in Kiev.”
For her, she said, there was no choice. “I just had a feeling that something should be done,” she said, “And I thought, ‘Why not me?’”
