DONETSK, Ukraine — For Larisa Horlova, a cashier, making the trip from rebel-held territory to Ukraine proper had been a routine matter, despite the shells that sometimes pounded into fields near the road as she drove. She did it every week or so to get money from her Ukrainian bank account, since A.T.M.s are no longer functioning in Donetsk.
But on Wednesday, when she made the often perilous dash over pavement slicked by melting snow to a Ukrainian border outpost, she found not safety but an order to turn around and drive back.
“They say I should live on the Ukrainian side, but I cannot travel back and forth,” Ms. Horlova said, standing on the shoulder of the road, amid a crowd of other bewildered residents.
Indeed, with a new offensive in full swing, the Ukrainian authorities are now doing all they can to halt cross-border movement, deploying the full force of a Byzantine bureaucracy on the more than three million people living in rebel-held areas.
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In a tiny room on the station’s second floor, a group of police officials and office workers sat surrounded by tall piles of handwritten applications, desperate pleas for help.
One man — Anton, a 28-year-old owner of a small trucking business whose parents live in Donetsk and who declined to give his last name for fear of jeopardizing his application — said that even after navigating this bureaucratic labyrinth, he had been told that he did not have sufficient reason to receive a pass.
He said the woman taking applications told him: “Do you think you are the only one here like this? Every day many people come here, they cry and beg me that they need the pass. But I refuse all of them!”
