Season November 2014

On Sunday, rebels in eastern Ukraine held their first ever elections, voting for the incumbent leader Alexander Zakharchenko to continue to run the territory under separatist control. With few observers present to verify the fairness of the voting, which itself was hastily organized, the election wasn't widely recognized. Russia was the only major power to recognize the vote as legitimate, while Ukraine and its allies in the West declared the poll to be a violation of a negotiated agreement reached in Minsk. VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky spoke with the rebel leader Zakharchenko as he cast his vote in Donetsk, and visited polling stations across the country’s war-torn east to find out what elections look like in a breakaway republic.

On November 3, the citizens of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic elected Alexander Zakharchenko as their prime minister, marking a supposed turning point in the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine. In the days after the election, VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky interviewed civilians in Donetsk about their lives over the past few months — visiting locals working in a market that sits dangerously close to the ongoing battle for Donetsk’s airport, as well as others who have been living in a bomb shelter for months following the destruction of their homes.

For the past six months, Donetsk has been a war zone. Firefighters in the area have not only had to cope with their stations being understaffed, but with putting out fires from shelling and mortars, a task they've never previously had to do, and now perform as many as 12 times a day. In this dispatch, VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky visited the firefighters of Fire Station 4, located near the Donetsk International Airport that is the site of an ongoing battle between the pro-Russia forces and the Ukrainian military.

During the war, various areas of eastern Ukraine under separatist control have been under the jurisdiction of field commanders, who run these areas under their own laws. VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky traveled to Alchevsk in the Luhansk region to interview Alexei Mozgovoi, who's been running a "people's court" in which people are tried for various crimes, from rape to theft, with residents acting as the jury.

On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing 298 innocent people. While investigations continue into exactly what happened, representatives from the Dutch Safety Board are still recovering pieces of the plane that have been lying in fields for four months. In the absence of an official determination, pro-Russia separatists and the Ukrainian government are putting out their own theories. VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky traveled to the site of the MH17 crash, where Dutch investigators continue their work, and spoke with a Cossack commander as well as a representative from the Ukrainian Security Services about the blame game between the two camps that will likely persist for months to come.