IT’S going on five years now since the barricades started going up in Donetsk. Back then just off Pushkin Boulevard in the heart of the city, every day the heaps of timber and tyres topped with barbed wire grew higher. For weeks during April 2014, pro-Russian separatists across eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region had been storming and occupying government buildings and seizing weapons.

Outside the main administrative building in Donetsk, some of the activists were miners or manual workers, others disgruntled youths many with a thuggish bearing wearing ski masks and carrying clubs, baseball bats and iron bars.

Every so often while moving through their ranks on the barricades, there was the whiff of petrol from Molotov cocktails.

With their fuel soaked rag fuses sticking out of the bottles the improvised incendiary bombs sat in beer crates clustered in strategic points, ready to be lobbed should the separatists be confronted by Ukrainian government troops or supporters.

The situation then was high-octane in more ways that one and is even more so today.

“In Kiev they say that Russian people in Donetsk should only speak Ukrainian not Russian, for me I would prefer Putin,” I still recall one activist insisting, as he stood draped in a Russian flag and reeking of smoke from the many brazier fires that burned at night to keep those manning the barricades warm.

Those days back in 2014 were just the beginning. Today those same pro-Moscow separatists that I met on the barricades all those years ago are now dug in along the frontline of an all-out war with the Ukrainian government in Kiev.

Tense as things were during that time, one could never have foreseen what would become of Ukraine’s Donbas region. The city of Donetsk itself would become the hub of what would be known as the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), sustained by Russian military and materiel support.

Back then too when I arrived at the city’s airport it was a glistening hub of steel and glass, specially built for the Uefa Euro 2012 of which Donetsk was a venue. Today though that same airport lies levelled by the fighting.

Across the region ruined houses, shell craters and deserted streets are testimony to a conflict that has killed more than 10,300 people and left millions of civilians displaced from their homes. This is a war that rarely makes the news headlines, one that many politicians and diplomats continue to prefer calling a "crisis" or "standoff" as if by using the word "war" they might inflame the situation.

Stewart McDonald MP for Glasgow South and SNP spokesperson for defence has only just returned from a parliamentary fact-finding mission in the region at the invitation of the Ukrainian ambassador. After speaking with politicians and civil society activists, McDonald believes the war has dropped off the radar for a number of reasons.

“The conflict is an unwelcome reminder that Europe is not as peaceful as it would like to think, and in the UK context, it’s difficult trying to explain that people are dying on a weekly basis to get into a club that the UK is intent on leaving,” he says.

The MP believes Ukraine is not only on the frontline of a military conflict, but also an ideological one, between the concepts of liberal democracy and authoritarianism.

“It has many problems, including around corruption and human rights, but needs to be nurtured on its journey, because if Ukraine falls, the frontline will move into Europe, via Hungary and Poland,” McDonald attests.

Try as many European leaders might to play down eastern Ukraine’s conflict, right now the war is again forcing its presence into both the headlines and minds of many diplomats and politicians.

Only last week, Alexander Hug, the deputy chief of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s monitoring mission in Ukraine (OSCE-SMM), described the latest ceasefire violations and fighting in eastern Ukraine as the “worst we have seen so far this year.”

The world too was reminded of this conflict’s capacity to impact more widely when last Thursday Dutch prosecutors identified a Russian military unit as the source of the missile that shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014, killing all 298 people on board.

On Friday, when Russian president Vladimir Putin was asked at an economic forum in St Petersburg whether a Russian army missile was involved, he simply replied: “Of course not”. Denial though of all kinds has been a hallmark of this conflict right from those early days back in 2014, when Moscow launched what military experts refer to as "hybrid warfare". Indeed nothing has been the same between Russia and the West since Russian soldiers without identifiable unit patches, or the “little green men,” as they became commonly known, stormed into Crimea in March 2014.

It was barely one month later that Moscow launched its proxy war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. That war still on-going, along with the Crimean land grab were the opening salvoes in Russia’s hybrid conflict, a gambit, some say by Vladimir Putin to fundamentally reshape the post-World War II global order.

Since then the war in eastern Ukraine has fluctuated in intensity but never gone away despite a 2015 peace agreement – the Minsk accords – and diplomatic efforts in recent months to settle it. The OSCE is the multinational group responsible for monitoring the cease-fire’s implementation, and in a briefing in Kiev last week its deputy chief of the mission, Alexander Hug confirmed that they had recorded 7,700 cease-fire violations in the past week alone.

Among the latest violence, Ukraine said two soldiers were killed and four were wounded in fighting near the village of Yuzhnoye last Monday. Russian-backed separatists meanwhile accused Kiev of shelling residential areas with heavy artillery and tanks in the past week saying four civilians were killed and four wounded in the bombardment.

Last week, the OSCE reported that one of its surveillance drones had observed a build up of heavy weapons proscribed by the Minsk cease-fire in the separatist controlled village of Buhaivka in the Donbas. Far and away though it’s the civilian population of eastern Ukraine that has borne the brunt of the violence.

Right now close to 3.5 million people caught up in the conflict urgently need humanitarian aid. Whole communities meanwhile live under the constant threat of artillery and gunfire, mines, and unexploded ordnance and now face growing food insecurity and outbreaks of diseases like tuberculosis.

Children in particular have been affected, the conflict taking a devastating toll on the education system, destroying and damaging hundreds of schools and forcing 200,000 girls and boys to learn in militarised environments.

“Children are learning in schools with bullet holes in the walls and sandbags in windows, bomb shelters in the basements and shrapnel in school yards,” says Unicef Ukraine representative Giovanna Barberis.

“The education system in eastern Ukraine has been in the crossfire for more than four years. All sides of the conflict must respect international humanitarian law and ensure that schools are safe places for children to learn.”

Such appeals though fall largely on deaf ears as the wider strategic and geopolitical tensions intensify. Just last week the Ukrainian military for the first time tested anti-tank missiles made in the US and supplied by the Trump administration. It’s a weapon the Ukrainian government believe could be part of a battlefield game-changer giving their troops substantially more firepower in any confrontation with Russian supplied tanks to the separatists.

The US government approved the sale of the Javelin anti-tank missiles in March at an estimated cost of roughly $47 million and the shipment arrived in Ukraine in late April. Ukraine’s pro-European President Poroshenko has repeatedly lobbied for the anti-tank missiles. Those American military officials meanwhile responsible for putting together a package of assistance for Ukraine, have been at pains to stress the importance of Javelin in giving Ukraine’s armed forces a needed boost in its conflict with Russia.

It goes without saying of course that Moscow will take a dim view of the US supplied arms and almost certainly view the delivery as a message of direct support for Ukraine from Western powers. But this in itself does not fully explain why, right now of all times, the conflict should again start to escalate. One factor weighing heavily on the minds of regional observers is that Ukraine faces crucial presidential and parliamentary elections in 2019.

“I believe Putin's recent inauguration for six years is the trigger for the new violence. He desperately wants to break the sanctions and the Nato build up and to prevent the strengthening of Ukrainian democracy and Western ties before the election,” says Stephen Blank, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council.

The significance of the forthcoming elections as well as the fluid strategic positioning on the battlefield are both factors other regional watchers point to for an uptick in the violence. Peter Dickinson a non-resident Fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank and publisher of Business Ukraine and Lviv Today magazines sees a number of plausible explanations.

“It could be part of a Kremlin bid to test the operational capabilities of Ukraine's new military command structures, or an attempt to instil a sense of urgency into stalled negotiations with Russia's Western counterparts,” Dickinson was quoted as saying in an Atlantic Council blog recently.

There is even the possibility, says Dickinson, that with Kiev hosting the Champions League final this weekend and showcasing the city to global audiences, it may also be seen as advantageous in Moscow to remind international audiences that Ukraine remains a warzone.

“The one thing we can say with any degree of certainty is that Russia has decided to dial up the conflict, as it has done regularly throughout the past three years of semi-static warfare,” Dickinson added.

For now the Minsk accords, concluded between the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany in 2015 in an effort to dampen the fighting, appear not to be working. The recent breakdown too of talks between US Ambassador Kurt Volker, US Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations, and Russian presidential aide Vladislav Surkov, have only added to the diplomatic impasse.

The SNP’s defence spokesman, Stewart McDonald, who recently visited frontline communities along with Ukrainian MPs Svitlana Zalishchuk and Alex Ryabchyn, believes the time is long overdue for the conflict to be recognised for what it is.

“It’s an occupation of a part of the territory of a sovereign nation by another, and not some sort of ‘Ukrainian civil war’. The ambiguity of language has allowed the Kremlin to escape the level of scrutiny and censure it should normally on such an issue,” the SNP MP told the Sunday Herald.

Writing in the Kyiv Post last week, OSCE deputy chief, Alexander Hug, described how ever since those days back in 2014 – when I first visited the barricades of Donetsk – eastern Ukraine has been what he called a place apart, a place of contradictions.

“This contradiction is everywhere along the contact line, with armed men killing men, women and children ostensibly to save and protect those same men, women and children,” he observed.

For many foreign visitors in Kiev this weekend for the Champions League final, the war in eastern Ukraine was both out of sight and out of mind. But Europe’s only ongoing land war is again seeing violence spike. Once again this "forgotten" conflict might just be about to make headlines for all the wrong reasons.