HE’S UNSHAVEN and disheveled, sporting a camoulage cap, baggy sweatpants and a grubby telnyashka—the striped undershirt worn by Soviet and Russian troops. He passes by as I chat with a group of Ukrainian government soldiers on a corner opposite the local barracks. The men eye him with disdain; one tosses him a cigarette, and he drifts of.
“Lumpen proletariat,” says Aleksandr Lubichenko, a Ukrainian military press officer. “He’s an old separatist—I can tell a mile of. Small man, big gun.”
“But he’s only holding an accordion,” I say.