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

ReutersCopyright: Reuters

This 12 months's Eurovision is unquestionably probably the most political in a long time.

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

However this 12 months’s occasion is political for different causes too. The Kalush Orchestra, the act which is able to characterize Ukraine tonight, was not the nation’s original selection.

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

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

Kalush Orchestra, a people rap group from Western Ukraine, obtained their probability instead.

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

Tonight, when the Kalash Orchestra take to the stage, they are going to be representing a nation that is more and more assured in itself.

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

A conflict predicated on the concept that this country had no nationwide identity, no foundational myths, no nationwide heroes, no will to resist, is what's uniting Ukraine more with every passing day.