They had gathered to say goodbye to Izba Chitalnya ("village reading room"), Donetsk's hippest cafe-bar, which was closing due to poor business as a result of the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine. When they belted out the first lines of the beloved No One Will Hear by the Russian band Chaif - "I haven't heard from my old friends, it's sad, and the daily newspaper leaves my soul empty" - it was almost as if they were singing about the turmoil in their own city.
It has been three months since pro-Russian protesters seized the Donetsk regional administration building, sparking the most serious separatist conflict in the former Soviet Union since it fell apart in 1991. At least 423 people have died, according to a June estimate by the UN.
Comment: Well, what really sparked this conflict was the western sponsored coup, and installation of a completely insane Nazi regime, death squads and all.
The upshot for Donetsk, once a city of a million people, is as much psychological as physical. Tens of thousands have fled and hundreds of businesses have closed. A surreal atmosphere pervades the city centre, where ATMs have run out of cash, shops shut early, and it is not uncommon to see men with machine guns posted outside a sushi restaurant or behind the wheel of a city ambulance. People strive to live as normally as possible: on one memorable occasion this month when a firefight endured for hours near the regional police headquarters, locals blithely went about their business in nearby districts as if they couldn't hear the shooting.
Comment: These people just want to be left alone. They are being punished for invoking their right to disassociate from the abomination in charge of Kiev, which is but a tendril of the US/NATO empire.