Provocation was rife but,remarkably,all sides refused to be provoked.

The pro-Russians carried discreet placards – A4-sized boards declaring"we won’t forget May 2",and"shame on fascists". A man hoisting a flag with an image of Joseph Stalin was definitely being provocative.

Those aligned with Kiev,the Maidan movement,had been asked not to wear blue and yellow ribbons,the national colours;but a good many of the pro-Moscow gang were sporting their St George's ribbons in the orange and black shades of the Colorado beetle,hence their name in local social media,"koloradiki".

The seeming reluctance of the pro-Moscow supporters to sing the Ukrainian national anthem,especially after they had clapped so enthusiastically to an old Soviet anthem,offended Maidan sensibilities. And when a policeman drew his baton for no apparent reason,a young Maidan supporter remarked on his readiness with a derisive"finally"– a reference to the remarkable failure of the city’s police to head off the May 2 blaze and the shooting of four Maidan supporters in the hours before the fire.

Ihor Palytsya is the new regional governor of Odessa,appointed by Kiev along with a new local police chief after the security debacle on the day of the fire. After placing a wreath at the monument,the 40-something businessman and independent MP said:‘‘There is no war in Odessa and I will fight the provocateurs that try to start one – all of Odessa will fight with me.’’

The towering Mr Palytsya’s point was that people in his city could see what was happening in communities in the Donbass region about 700 kilometres to the east;and further afield in Crimea. Odessans want none of that.

Acknowledging the sea of ageing fighters around him,Mr Palytsya said through an interpreter:‘‘The veterans say war is terrible,that’s why we should not take up arms. We have one country,our motherland – if you are pro-European,just explain it;and you don’t have to resort to weapons to argue that you are pro-Russian.’’

That’s not how the script played out among the crowd at Trade Union House,where youngsters hung from the shattered windows and a group of young men won a rousing cheer when they emerged on the roof – planting a pro-Russian red flag on the parapet and yelling"we will win"to the crowd below.

As many flowers were strewn on the forecourt of the building as had been laid at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The clothing of some of the victims had also been deposited among the floral tributes with,in some cases,the wooden clubs and makeshift protective gear they had used. Nearby,chunks of bitumen,which had been torn up for use as projectiles,formed a menacing mosaic on the roadside.

Votive candles were a counterpoint to the eternal flame at the military memorial and bursts of patriotic song,as weeping women were escorted from the building,confirmed the propaganda value of the fire for the pro-Russian camp.

Previously the bulk of those killed in the course of this crisis were Maidan supporters,gunned down in February by security forces under ousted pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych.

Now the pro-Russian faction had its own martyrs and a security cock-up that allows them to place blame at the feet of the Kiev government,which had already revealed its own ugly side with a brief rush to formally abandon the special status enjoyed by the Russian language in Ukraine. It didn’t matter that it later reversed the move – its intent had been revealed.

And when Kiev security forces detained a rebel leader this week,the radical politician Oleg Lyashko put pictures on his website of himself interrogating the prisoner,who had been stripped to his underwear,with his hands tied tied behind his back.

In the Trade Union House forecourt,there were chants of"Odessa will never give up". Wildly exaggerated accounts of the inferno and its aftermath were traded – the death toll was counted in hundreds,not tens;and bodies of the victims had been chopped to pieces.

A man was overheard telling a companion:‘‘The people on the other side should be frightened – the new officials they have appointed will be dead soon.’’

A woman in a bright yellow jacket pushed to the front of the crowd,yelling"we’ll take our revenge". When I approached her,she hesitated,giving just her first name – Ludmilla. A friend cheering her on,introduced herself simply as Svetlana.

But these two were a revelation,proof of the pro-Russian success in rewriting the narrative of this conflict as a war on fascism,not an attempt to dismember a notionally independent country.

‘‘We are Ukrainian – but we are Russian,’’ Ludmilla told me. ‘‘Odessa has always been a Russian city and we stand for the Russian language and for[a loose federalist system of government for Ukraine]. But we want to be by ourselves,we don’t want the fascists.’’

Asked if Odessa’s future lay in a Crimea-like secessionist vote,Svetlana said:‘‘I don’t know what the future holds – just no fascists. We don’t want a so-called united land because normal,common people can’t unite with fascists.’’

Vasiliy Polishchuk,a retired officer of the border protection agency who serves on the city council,was in full military dress and he too reduced a very complex equation to a simplistic chant:no fascism.

Citing fascist atrocities over time,he added the deaths at Trade Union House to the list.

But he too will not acknowledge the breakaway question. ‘‘Odessa never wants to be separated from Ukraine,it just doesn’t want to be a part of fascism.’’

Did he want Putinism? ‘‘We just want Ukraine without fascism.’’

There were rumours of groups of fighting-aged strangers being detained as they attempted to infiltrate Odessa. The city’s half-dozen universities were ordered closed for a week. And a Maidan militia network of checkpoints was being credited with,again,frustrating pro-Russian efforts to seize public buildings,as they had done elsewhere,making them platforms from which to campaign loudly and violently against the interim government in Kiev – if that indeed had been a separatist plan for Odessa.

Despite separatist successes further to the east,home to most of Ukraine’s ethnic Russians and a powerful business elite that has had heavy-handed control of Ukraine’s economic and political levers of power since independence,Sunday was shaping as a moment of truth for the breakaway movement.

Straws in the Donbass wind cast doubt on the outcome and legitimacy of a breakaway referendum which is to proceed on Sunday in Donetsk,Luhansk and Slaviansk – despite what might have been read as a persuasive midweek call by the Russian leader Vladimir Putin for the vote be postponed. Rebel leaders were undeterred,claiming it would be appropriate for Mr Putin to read the result in the media along with the rest of the world.

If Victory Day was to be a Russian day of celebration,the denizens of Donetsk were mightily unimpressed. The reported turnout was just 5000,a tenth of the usual attendance at the ceremony.

At Mariupol,110 kilometres to the south,there were conflicting reports of violence as Ukrainian military forces pressed their campaign to retake government buildings that had been commandeered by separatists.

‘‘Twenty terrorists killed,’’ the Kiev government claimed;eight separatists dead,according to Mr Lyashko,who likes to wield a pitchfork in publicity shots;‘‘three dead and 25 wounded,’’ according to medical sources in Donetsk.

The effort to retake a police station apparently ended in a nil-all draw. It was destroyed in a blaze of fire.

As in Afghanistan,where the Taliban is often blamed for violence perpetrated by local warlords and tribal power brokers,there are reports of a similar anarchic dynamic in Ukraine’s east,with most of the violence attributed to the settlement of personal and business scores.

There’s a local version of the Odessa claim of outsiders infiltrating to cause trouble – but in the east,the infiltrators reputedly come from the west of the country. And local leaders,backed by Moscow,have been finessing the anti-fascist rhetoric for months.

There’s hostage-taking and the intimidation of reporters. In rural Konstantinovka,separatists reportedly seized the entire print-run of a local paper of which they did not approve.

Pro-Ukrainians in the east,generally,have gone to ground. Many local officials are fleeing,and the police evaporate or sign on with the separatists. A Kiev-aligned activist recently toldThe Independent in London:‘‘The pro-Moscow people have this referendum coming up[on secession] soon,they have threatened they will really deal with us after that.’’

Despite separatist claims to control swathes of territory,there are conflicting reports on the number of polling places they will have for the referendum. There's an account from one community that an urn is to be taken house-to-house to collect votes in the absence of an official polling station.

Kiev has urged locals to boycott the poll as a political fraud.

At one stage,the so-called People’s Republic of Donetsk said it would operate 1200 polling stations and 53 counting centres to handle more than 3 million ballot papers which had been run off on a battery of photocopying machines. But by some accounts,their territorial claims are wildly overstated – in an area that theDaily Telegraphin London estimates to be the size of Wales,the paper reports that apart from their control of the town of Slaviansk,the separatist hold elsewhere was confined to a series of government buildings in a dozen centres.

Kiev challenged the legitimacy of the vote with the release of what purportedly was a recording of a phone call in which two separatist operatives discuss how the outcome of the poll was to be rigged.

The website of the Ukrainian security service,which has posted the call on its website,claims one of the men,speaking from Moscow,is a senior rebel figure in Donetsk – Aleksandr Barkashov. The service claims he is talking to Dmytro Boitsov,another Donetsk separatist.

Amid much cursing,a voice identified as Mr Boitsov’s calls for the poll to be abandoned,but Mr Barkashov argues no,that the whole thing should be scammed.

Mockingly,he seems to imply there was never an intention to have a proper vote:‘‘Are you going to walk around and collect papers? Are you insane? Let’s say 89 per cent voted for the Donetsk republic and that’s it.’’

On Thursday,Slaviansk’s self-appointed mayor Vyachislav Ponomaryov showed reporters a sample ballot paper that asks just one question in both Russian and Ukrainian:‘‘Do you support the declaration of independence of the Donetsk People’s Republic?’’

Mr Ponomaryov was confident of a big"yes"vote,which he argued would pave the way for closer ties to Moscow and,possibly,a future union. ‘‘For now,we should just specify for ourselves that we should definitively secede from Kiev and then we’ll decide for ourselves which path to take,’’ he said.

How people vote will be a fascinating measure of the gap between what they really think and what they are being told to think.

According to a Pew opinion poll released this week,only 14 per cent of respondents in the east favoured secession and a good 70 per cent wanted Ukraine to hold together as a single entity. Outside Crimea,only a minority of Ukraine’s Russian speakers approved of Moscow’s role in the country – 41 per cent.

If there was a"yes"vote and if Moscow was to act on it,Kiev would see another 16,000 square kilometres of territory,and 10 per cent of its population,go the same way as Crimea. With 4.5 million people,Donetsk is the most populous region of the country and home to a sizeable chunk of the Ukrainian economy.

Ukraine is coming apart because Moscow is driving it that way,and Kiev does not have the power to stop it.

Despite the West’s tut-tutting,the Russian leader seems to have been in the driver’s seat all along – dictating events from Kiev’s rejection of a deal with the European Union to his home-run with Crimea as a new Russian state – all the time pushing his objective of seeing the Ukraine constitution rewritten,to create a weak federation over which Moscow could have greater control.

For the same reason,Moscow is demanding that a presidential election scheduled for May 25 be postponed. It’s argument about first imposing security and constitutional reform is read as a cover for its concern that a Moscow-backed candidate would fare badly in the current environment.

Kiev’s response is equally preposterous. The country is safe and secure enough for a presidential vote but,the interim government says,is not sufficiently so for a constitutional referendum. So it plans to proceed,to consult the people on who should run the country,but not on how the country should be run.

Despite NATO claims that Mr Putin has not acted on his latest claim to pull troops back from Russia’s border with Ukraine,Moscow’s rhetoric is being read as a lessening of the chances of further territorial incursions beyond what the West sees as the Kremlin's land-grab in Crimea.

Just as Mr Putin positioned himself as a diplomatic"good guy"in calling for the Donetsk referendum to be abandoned,Moscow also swooped in this week,sending an envoy to successfully negotiate the release of a team of European military observers who had been captured by separatists on April 25 – four Germans,a Czech,a Dane and a Pole.

Similarly,despite accusations that Moscow sank the last effort for a global diplomatic resolution to the crisis,Mr Putin is calling for fresh negotiations to resolve the crisis.

Perhaps the greatest provocation in the weekend came when Mr Putin turned up in the newly annexed Crimea for the Victory Day celebrations,during which he lectured Ukraine and the world.

At a military parade in Sevastopol on the Black Sea,he said:‘‘I am sure that 2014 will go into the annals of our whole country as the year when the nations living here firmly decided to be together with Russia,affirming fidelity to the historical truth and the memory of our ancestors.’’

But Ukraine’s contemporary struggle,over a future with Europe and its past with Moscow,has been around for longer than Mr Putin might remember.

Ivan Beshoff,the last survivor of the Potemkin mutiny,died in 1987 at the age of 102,more than 70 years after resettling in Dublin – where he ran a fish and chip shop.