Apart from a small barricade of tires blocking the backdoor, there was no outward sign that the city hall in Ukraine’s fifth largest city, Donetsk, had been taken over by armed separatists on Wednesday morning. They hadn’t even replaced the building’s Ukrainian flag with the Russian one yet. If a local resident like Anastasia Marova, a student at the city’s technical college, had wanted to see them, she would have had to walk through the sliding glass doors of the main entrance, where a handful of nervous men with shotguns and assault rifles were guarding the turnstiles.