An ancient truck filled with earth and smouldering sulphur rumbles past, its simmering load releasing a noxious smoke trail which plays accompaniment to the belching chimneys of a giant steel mill nearby. This crumbling industrial wasteland is the hometown of Ukraine's pro-Russian presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovich and although the stakes in the country's contested presidential elections are high here, you wouldn't notice it by driving through.
Few of the locals display Yanukovich's campaign color blue on their clothing, there are no demonstrations in his support in the city's center - in fact, little stirs other than the lorries brimming with scrap metal or industrial waste that roll by.
"We've got jobs to do, money to earn, we're not going to waste our time on the streets like those animals in Kiev," said Ludmila Pelepchatina, with a scowl.
While most of Ukraine's west donned the opposition party's orange colors and filled the streets of the capital Kiev to put pressure on the government for what they said were massive irregularities during the presidential poll, in the east, a bitter populace keeps a silent protest.
Pelepchatina heads the workers' union at the Ordzhonikidze Coal transport depot on the edge of Yenakievo, closer to Russia than Kiev - the depot Yanukovich headed in the 1970s and 1980s. Like most of the town's population she voted for the 54-year-old prime minister in last month's elections and doesn't understand why protests in the capital and western Ukraine have made Yanukovich's official win come unstuck.
Pelepchatina was the deputy head of Yenakievo's 50th voting district during the elections in which 93.7 percent of the votes went to Yanukovich. "Don't those votes count?" she asked.
"If all bosses were like him, then there would be order in this country," Pelepchatina said of the man she worked with for half a decade. "People were drawn to him."
The coalmine-girded Yenakievo is a grim place, with the steel mill in the middle of the 200,000-strong city its largest enterprise. It was here that Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev tested an atomic bomb in one of the disused mine shafts during the height of the cold war with the United States.
Its residents worry that a win by opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko could mean a return to the days when world metal prices were low and jobs were scarce - as it had indeed been back when Yushchenko was Ukraine's prime minister.
"Yushchenko is very aggressive, I don't know what kind of a person he is, but I know Vitya," said 76-year-old Valentina Sysoyeva who lived next door to a teenage Yanukovich up until the day he was sent to prison on assault charges.
Vitya - the diminutive form of Viktor in Russian - was a calm boy who kept his word and would always say hello, Sysoyeva reminisced. The assault charges stemmed from his friendship with a young man named Yury, who was eight years older and forced Yanukovich to take the rap for a botched attempt to steal a wristwatch.
"Fate didn't treat him well, his mother died when he was three and after his grandmother passed away there was nobody to look after him except for his father who couldn't get him out of the trouble he got himself into," Sysoyeva said.
The small cottage next door to Sysoyeva's where Yanukovich once lived with his stepmother, father and two half-sisters is now dusty and empty. One of his sisters is a street cleaner in Yenakievo, the other is in a mental institution. "She's schizoid or something, you know, there's something wrong with her," Sysoyeva said.
But the locals say they trust the poor boy who made it big. "He has authority here because he is a man of his word," said 54-year-old Vladimir Savenko, who claimed he used to hang out with Yanukovich when he was young.
"I worked in a mine for 35 years and my pension was only 200 hryvna (38 dollars)," Savenko said. Recently it was raised to 800, but "they'll take it back if Yushchenko wins."
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