Yes, right. They can gather a 5 thousand crowd in a city under a Ukrainian flag, and on another day there is a 10,000 crowd under the Russian flag.
And another 985,000 residents still don’t give a flying carp.
Without disputing which flag got 5 and which 10 thousand, that is normal: it shows that there are both loyalists and separatists in the East, and some of them feel enough passion about it to go and demonstrate.
What is not normal is that de-sovietization hasn’t even started in Russia: Lenin idols and red flags are still gathering points for the separatists. In Russia proper there is a schizophrenic mix of soviet symbolism and that of Imperial Russia: communist pentacle and two-headed eagle, often blended into one horrific symbol of confusion. Stalin has been re-cast as more or less savior of Europe from “fascism”; the cult of the 1945 victory is clearly designed to vindicate the terror of Lenin and Stalin. That is aberrant.