Ukraine war latest: Russians pushed again far out of Kharkiv – City mayor

ReutersCopyright: Reuters

This 12 months's Eurovision is surely essentially the most political in a very long time.

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

But this 12 months’s occasion is political for different reasons too. The Kalush Orchestra, the act which can represent Ukraine tonight, was not the country’s original alternative.

That was Alina Pash, a 29-year-old rapper and former actuality 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 probability as an alternative.

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

Tonight, when the Kalash Orchestra take to the stage, they are going to be representing a nation that's more and more confident 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 national id, no foundational myths, no nationwide heroes, no will to withstand, is what's uniting Ukraine more with every passing day.