Ukraine warfare latest: Russians pushed back far out of Kharkiv – City mayor

ReutersCopyright: Reuters

This year's Eurovision is unquestionably essentially the most political in a very long time.

Russia has been banned. Ukraine is the runaway favorite to win, buoyed by a basic sense of solidarity around the remainder of the continent.

However this 12 months’s occasion is political for other reasons too. The Kalush Orchestra, the act which is able to characterize Ukraine tonight, was not the country’s unique selection.

That was Alina Pash, a 29-year-old rapper and former reality show contestant.

But when it was alleged she had visited occupied Crimea, she was dropped amid public outcry.

Kalush Orchestra, a folks rap group from Western Ukraine, received their chance instead.

Wearing conventional outfits and drawing on the nation’s long but repressed musical traditions, they're an implicit rebuke to the suggestion, oft repeated by Vladimir Putin, that Ukraine shouldn't be a real country - however merely a "little Russia", a area that wants reintegration.

Tonight, when the Kalash Orchestra take to the stage, they will be representing a nation that's increasingly assured in itself.

And therein lies the irony, some would say strategic blunder, at the coronary heart of president Putin’s invasion.

A struggle predicated on the concept that this nation had no nationwide identity, no foundational myths, no national heroes, no will to withstand, is what's uniting Ukraine extra with every passing day.