‘I’ve noticed that the Russian media is significantly cutting back the flow of information about what is happening in Donbass’, the dissident writer Edward Limonov recorded on LiveJournal on 15 September. ‘Apparently there is an order not to destroy the illusion of a continuing truce.’ He then listed the number of civilians killed the previous day by Kiev’s artillery (twenty), noting the places in eastern Ukraine where there was fighting, the build-up of Kiev’s forces at Donetsk airport and the launch of US-led military exercises in the Lviv region. ‘So the truce looks like war’, he ended, signing off the weblog in his habitual style: ‘That was the morning sermon … I am Edward Limonov.’

Limonov, now in his early seventies, prophesied conflict in Ukraine decades ago. There is a YouTube clip of him in 1992, after the collapse of the USSR, orating in the streets about how nationalism would lead to violence, demanding to know why Crimea, Kharkov and Donbass should belong to Ukraine