Every evening after sunset, my landlady, Nastya, would draw the curtains as the bombs started falling around Donetsk and tune into the TV news, broadcast across the border from Moscow.

Russia’s state-owned Rossiya 1 provided the diet of current affairs in our cramped, Soviet-era apartment. Militias had taken over transmission facilities the previous year, forcing Ukrainian fare off the airwaves in the country’s eastern, separatist heartlands.

A stout, straight-talking woman in her 60s, Nastya was twice-widowed and supplemented her meager pension by working part-time as a security guard at a supermarket. She had the night off, and she was in a fearsome mood.

“Look at this Nazi!” she seethed, as the television projected an unflattering image of Ukraine’s President, Petro Poroshenko, the confectionery tycoon sworn into office following 2014’s pro-European Maidan revolution.