Clashes broke out around a television tower on the outskirts of the rebel stronghold of Slaviansk shortly before voters made their way to polling stations through streets blocked by barricades of felled trees, tyres and rusty machinery.
"I wanted to come as early as I could," said Zhenya Denyesh, a 20-year-old student, second to vote at a concrete three-storey university building. "We all want to live in our own country."
Asked what he thought would follow the vote, organised in a matter of weeks by rebels, he replied: "It will still be war."
In nearby Mariupol, scene of fierce fighting last week, officials said there were only eight polling centres for half a million people. Queues grew to hundreds of metres and at one centre voting urns were set out on the pavement against a wall.
Western leaders threatened more sanctions against Russia in the key areas of energy, financial services and engineering if it continued what they regard as efforts to destabilise Ukraine.
Moscow denies any role in the fighting or any ambitions to absorb the mainly Russian-speaking east, an industrial hub, into the Russian Federation following its annexation of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea after a referendum in March.
Ukraine's Interior Ministry called the referendum a criminal farce, its ballot papers "soaked in blood". One official said that two thirds of the territory had declined to participate.
For a vote on which so much hangs, the referendum in the regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, which has declared itself a "People's Republic", seemed a decidedly ad hoc affair. Ballot papers were printed without security provision, polling stations were limited in many areas, voter registration was patchy and there was confusion on quite what people were asked to endorse.
Engineer Sergei, 33, voting in the industrial centre of Mariupol, said he would answer "Yes" to the question on the ballot paper, printed in Russian and Ukrainian: "Do you support the act of state self-rule of the Donetsk People's Republic?"
"We're all for the independence of the Donetsk republic," he said. "It means leaving behind that fascist, pro-American government (in Kiev), which brought no one any good.
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