A woman pulls her shopping trolley as she walks past a building that was damaged by shelling in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, in this October 15, 2014 file photograph. REUTERS/Shamil Zhumatov/Files

By Liisa Tuhkanen and Guy Faulconbridge

LONDON (Reuters) - Andriy left his home town in western Ukraine earlier this year on a journey that brought him through the hands of shady traders in Poland to one of the world's booming markets for illegal immigrants - London.

Fleeing the strife of war with Russian-backed fighters and a shattered economy, Andriy is following a path similar to one taken by thousands of his fellow Ukrainians who have traveled either eastwards to Russia or westwards to the European Union.

"I don't want to fight in any war," said Andriy, who spoke on the condition neither his surname nor home town would be published because of fear that he could be deported.

The nineteen-year-old, speaking in Russian because his English is limited, added: "I don't want to die - I want to live. I just want a normal life."

More than 4,300 combatants and civilians have been killed in eastern Ukraine since pro-Russian rebels seized border regions in April. Nearly a million people have fled the area, with a surge in the past two months.

Most have fled to other areas of Ukraine but some have gone further afield, with thousands seeking a new life in Russia and, increasingly, Europe.

According to several legal and illegal migrants who spoke to Reuters, many are coming via gangs in Poland, the Baltics and Ukraine that offer fake or doctored EU documents for several thousand dollars, plus the option of transport to Western Europe where spot document checks are extremely rare.

The nature of illegal immigration means it yields little data but legal flows show Ukrainians were the biggest single group of non-EU citizens granted residency permits by EU members in 2013.

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Bullets are placed on a stone at a checkpoint controlled by the Ukrainian army near the town of Deba …

According to Eurostat, 236,700 Ukrainians were granted residency permits by EU states last year, and 171,800 of those permits were granted in Poland, one of the main routes for Ukrainians to travel to Western Europe.

The flows abroad are modest compared to the exodus during the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union or the Jewish emigration that helped populate New York's Brighton Beach, but stories such as Andriy's give a sense of the turmoil sowed by the crisis.

For a story on Britain's immigration problem, click here:

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SILENT WORKERS

Some men are driven to leave by the fear of being called up into the poorly equipped Ukrainian army that is fighting the Russian-backed rebels.

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A woman pulls her shopping trolley as she walks past a building that was damaged by shelling in Done …

For many other migrants, finding acceptably paid work is the overriding reason to travel.

Their voices are silent in European discourse, but illegal migrants such as Andriy are cast by some politicians as the enemies of hardworking European voters.

The migrants thrive in a taxless underworld that is flush with demand and cash: Andriy has no intention of returning to Ukraine because demand for his decorating and repair services is high in London's booming property market.

The cash he can earn in Britain - often more than several hundred pounds a week - far outstrips what he could earn in Ukraine's near-bankrupt $135 billion economy.

For some Ukrainians the turmoil stoked by the Russian-backed insurgents is the final straw in a wider disenchantment with the day-to-day reality of corrupt elites, economic collapse and violence that has followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Popular destinations for Ukrainians include Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Britain's attractiveness is dampened by more stringent border controls than other EU countries.

Reuters has seen one of the doctored documents used as identification by migrants, who said Poland was the door to freedom for many.

"Lots of people go illegally," said a Ukrainian woman living legally in Poland, who did not want to be identified. "Lots of people go through Poland... it’s where Europe starts."

'SKYPE PARENTS'

With the correct documents, a Ukrainian living in the European Union could legally seek work, pay tax, open a bank account and travel home.

Without the correct documents, migrants in Europe are forced to work around the law.

As a result many spend years apart from their children who benefit from their earnings but not their presence.

"Migrants come for a better life but there are some heartbreaking situations: Mothers who have left their children in Ukraine and communicate by Skype," said Andy Hunder, director of the Ukrainian Institute in London.

"They feed their children but to feed them they must leave them," he said.

(Additional reporting by Christian Lowe and Wiktor Szary in Warsaw and Aija Krūtaine in Riga; Editing by Sophie Walker)

Smoke raises behind an Islamic State flag after Iraqi security forces and Shiite fighters took control of Saadiya in Diyala province from Islamist State militants, November 24, 2014. REUTERS/Stringer

By Dominic Evans and Oliver Holmes

BAGHDAD/BEIRUT (Reuters) - They have made enemies across the globe and endured three months of U.S.-led air strikes, but Islamic State fighters have surrendered little of their self-declared caliphate to the broad sweep of forces arrayed against them.

Across thousands of square miles in Syria and Iraq, the radical Islamists face an unlikely mix of Iraqi and Syrian soldiers, Shi'ite and Kurdish militias and rival Syrian Sunni Muslim rebels.

While they have lost towns on the edges of their Iraqi realm, especially in ethnically mixed areas where their hardline Sunni theology holds little appeal, they have consolidated power in parts of their Sunni Muslim heartland.

In August, Islamic State's attack on Iraqi Kurdish regions was repulsed and two months later its fighters were driven from the town of Jurf al-Sakhar, south of Baghdad. It was also pushed out of two towns near the Iranian border last month.

But with a few exceptions, such as the army's breaking of an Islamic State siege of the country's largest oil refinery in Baiji, the militants' hold over predominantly Sunni provinces north and west of Baghdad has not been seriously challenged.

Islamic State's opponents say the recaptured towns show the tide has turned in Iraq and the group is on the defensive.

"The best they can do now is to cut a road or attack a patrol, but any advances and gains of territory have been completely stopped." said Hadi al-Amiri, head of the Badr Organization, a Shi'ite militia which along with Kurdish peshmerga spearheaded the recapture of Saadiya and Jalawla, near the Iranian border.

Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, rallying his fighters three weeks ago, said the U.S. despatch of more military advisers to Iraq showed the opposite was true.

"The Crusaders' air strikes and constant bombardment day and night of Islamic State positions have not prevented its advance," he said.

In fact, since Islamic State's June offensive, it has had little success breaking beyond the solidly Sunni Muslim provinces of Anbar in the west and Salahuddin north of Baghdad, as well as the strongly Sunni province of Nineveh, home to the city of Mosul which the Islamists overran in June.

Iraqi security expert Hisham al-Hashemi said the picture across Iraq overall was a stalemate, with government forces regaining some territory but Islamic State imposing itself more forcefully at its core.

He said Islamic State now controls 85 percent of Anbar province, where it is attacking the provincial capital Ramadi and has killed hundreds of Sunni tribesmen who opposed it.

"The tipping point for defeating them in my view is when we win over the Sunni Arab tribes in Anbar, Salahuddin and Nineveh ... that will be the beginning of the end of ISIS," said Finance Minister Hoshiyar Zebari, using a former name for Islamic State.

SYRIAN "NON-STRATEGY"

While in Iraq there are clear areas where Islamic State is on the defensive, in Syria it is under less pressure because the U.S. has few allies on the ground backing up its air offensive.

Washington has been clear that its policy in Syria is modest compared to Iraq, focusing on preventing Islamic State moving across the border and on hitting its command and control.

But the militants in Syria, and Western analysts, say the air campaign has failed to weaken them.

Anthony Cordesman, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the U.S. is pursuing a "non-strategy" in Syria, hamstrung by conflicting priorities of dealing with Islamic State and President Bashar al-Assad.

The result was a "strategic mess" allowing Assad's forces to step up air attacks on other rebel groups, some sympathetic to Washington, while leaving Islamic State targets to U.S.-led coalition forces.

Islamic State supporters say the air strikes have helped the group win support among residents and also attracted more fighters.

"Do they think bombing us will scare us and we will just run home?" said a fighter in the IS-controlled city of Raqqa.

"When the whole world is trying to save Kobani we are expanding and growing in Iraq and Syria," he said, referring to the battle for the Kurdish border town in north Syria.

The Pentagon said last month the strikes in Syria had hit Islamic State resources including oil installations, command facilities and training camps.

"We know that they continue to attract people to their ranks," he said. "You don't wipe that out through air strikes, and you certainly don't do it in 90 days."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that around 1,000 strikes in both countries were having a significant impact.

But an Islamic State fighter in Syria was scornful. "Before you defeat your enemy you must understand it," he said. "This is the first rule in combat and these idiots missed it."

(Additional reporting by Mariam Karouny in Beirut, Michael Georgy and Saif Hameed in Baghdad, and Phil Stewart in Washington; Editing by Giles Elgood)

Associated Press Videos
Raw: Building Burns After Chechnya Gun Battle

GROZNY, Russia (AP) — Security forces in the capital of Russia's North Caucasus republic of Chechnya stormed two buildings, including a school, in fierce gun battles with militants early Thursday that left at least 19 dead, authorities said.

The fighting, which punctured the patina of stability ensured by years of heavy-handed rule by the Kremlin-appointed leader, erupted just hours before Russian President Vladimir Putin was to give his annual state of the nation address in Moscow.

In his address, Putin said he was confident that local Chechen forces were capable of dealing with the "rebels," who he suggested were receiving support from abroad.

The National Anti-Terrorist Committee said militants traveling in three cars entered the republic's capital, Grozny, at 1 a.m., killing three traffic police at a checkpoint, and then occupied the 10-story Press House in the center of the city. The federal agency said six gunmen were killed inside the building, which was gutted in a blazing fire that also spread to a nearby market.

More gunmen were later found in a nearby school and security forces were sent to "liquidate" them, the agency said. No students or teachers were in the school when it was seized by the militants, RIA Novosti quoted vice principal Islam Dzhabrailov as saying.

Russian state television showed video footage of security officers firing automatic weapons and grenade launchers at the three-story school, its windows left shattered and charred.

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who traveled to Moscow for Putin's address in the Kremlin, told journalists afterward that the security operation was completed and his forces had killed at least nine militants.

The National Anti-Terrorist Committee said 10 officers were killed and 28 wounded in the fight against the militants, who it said were from a known group operating in the North Caucasus.

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Firefighters examine burned-out market pavilions in central Grozny, Russia, Thursday, Dec. 4, 2014. …

Kadyrov said the militants were connected to Doku Umarov, a Chechen and longtime leader of Islamic militants in the North Caucasus who died last year.

Although unrest is common across the largely Muslim region in southern Russia, forceful security measures adopted by Kadyrov spared Grozny significant violence for several years. The relative calm has allowed Putin to claim success in subduing the Islamic insurgency in Chechnya after years of war.

In October, however, a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a concert hall in Grozny, killing five policemen and wounding 12 others as the city celebrated Kadyrov's birthday.

Dmitry Trenin, who heads the Carnegie Moscow Center, wrote in a Twitter post that "the night attack in Grozny looks senseless, except as an attempt to embarrass Putin hours before his annual address to parliament." Putin already was under pressure to reassure Russians as fears grow over soaring inflation and a plummeting ruble.

Life News, a news outlet believed to have links to Russian security services, cited law enforcement officials as saying about 15 people seized three cars late Wednesday in the village of Shalazhi and drove to Grozny, some 50 kilometers (30 miles) away.

The Kavkaz Center website, a mouthpiece for Islamic militant groups operating in the North Caucasus, carried a link to a video message by an individual claiming responsibility for the attacks. The man in the video claimed to be operating under orders from Chechen Islamist leader Aslan Byutukayev, known to his followers as Emir Khamzat.

The video could not immediately be verified.

A few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Chechnya was plunged into a full-scale war when separatist rebels pursued independence for the republic. The violence was largely confined to that small republic, but rebels ventured into other parts of Russia.

A fragile peace settlement was reached with Moscow until 1999, when an insurgency movement increasingly inspired by radical Islamist ideas reignited the conflict. A military crackdown succeeded by years of aggressive rule by Kadyrov has quietened the region, pushing unrest to neighboring provinces.

Kadyrov has been widely denounced for human rights abuses, including allegations of killing opponents. He has also imposed some Islamic restrictions on the region, including mandatory headscarves for women in public.

In a message Thursday on his Instagram account, which Kadyrov uses to issue public statements, he boasted of running the operation at the Press House himself.

"Not one bandit managed to get out," he wrote.

Kadyrov posted a picture showing the lower half of an apparently dead gunman lying beside a rifle, but it was not immediately clear if it showed one of the presumed attackers.

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Nataliya Vasilyeva and Lynn Berry in Moscow contributed to this report.