• Les forces ukrainiennes consolident les tranchées dans l’attente d’une offensive. Reportage à Pisky, juste à l’ouest de l’extrémité de la piste de l’aéroport de Donetsk.
    À la fin de l’article, ce point de vue d’un « local ».

    Ukraine’s field army digs in for separatist offensive - Telegraph
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/11247933/Ukraines-field-army-digs-in-for-separatist-offensive.html

    A Donetsk native, Artyem says this checkpoint will be his home until he can get back his own place in the separatist-occupied city.
    But perhaps worse than the weather is the sense that, despite being a local, he is not entirely welcome.
    Several of the towns west of Donetsk raised rebel flags before being retaken by the volunteer battalions in summer, and uncomfortable truth for Kiev is that the sympathies of many locals lie on the other side of the lines.
    About seventy per cent of people around here support them,” said Artyem, who refused to give his second name. “There is a separatist lives over there,” he says, pointing towards the village up the road from his checkpoint. “Every time he drives through the checkpoint he tells me to go back where I came from. I tell him ’mate, this is my home.’
    Perhaps because they include a number of Donetsk natives, the men of Dnipro 1 seem less inclined than some other Ukrainian units to believe that their enemies are just Russian mercenaries.
    We captured a Russian paratrooper major a while back, so we know they [the Russians] are there. But along with them are the locals,” said Sergei, also a native of Donetsk.
    We’re on our own land,” he added, repeating a line popular on both sides of this war. “We know we’re defending our homes, and that is what makes us stronger.”
    The tragic irony is that is precisely what the men in camouflage on the other side of the lines also say.

    • Au même endroit, le New York Times souligne l’impéritie du gouvernement ukrainien et l’implication cruciale des volontaires.

      With Borscht and Rifle Scopes, Volunteers Power Ukraine Forces - NYTimes.com
      http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/world/with-borscht-and-rifle-scopes-volunteers-power-ukraine-forces.html

      While this dedication to defending the country may warm the hearts of Ukrainian patriots, it also reflects the dismal state the military has fallen into, haphazardly equipped by a bankrupt government and receiving only minimal, defensive-oriented aid from the West.

      With talk rife of an imminent rebel offensive, senior Ukrainian officials put on a brave face and never pass up an opportunity to reiterate that their army is ready. On a recent visit to the front lines, however, the soldiers seemed to be lacking just about everything, including such basics as fuel and warm coats.
      (…)
      What is wrong with our government?” said Anastasia S. Kuznetsova, 22, a social worker in Dnepropetrovsk, who helps coordinate donations. “Winter is here and the soldiers don’t have warm clothes. They will be living in the snow and sleeping in trenches. And schoolchildren are sending them socks.

      At one sandbagged redoubt on a November morning, soldiers stood around a campfire, slathering toast with a tart, homemade cranberry jam.

      It’s a people’s army,” Mikola I. Fakas, a private, said. “Some people fight, and some people supply them. The state is not an intermediary, and not a spoke in the wheel.” Of those who donated the jam, he said he was very grateful. “They love us, they trust us, they are counting on us.

      Volunteers are allowed powerful weapons like .50-caliber rifles and antitank rocket-propelled grenades, but are not provided factory-made armored vehicles. On the Ukrainian side of the front, monstrous vehicles made from vans welded with steel plates rumble along the roads.
      (…)
      Russian news media routinely vilify the proliferation of nongovernmental military organizations, dismissing them as the private armies of Ukrainian oligarchs, and to be sure, wealthy industrialists do play a big role. So do the legions of do-it-yourself enthusiasts in Ukraine.