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

ReutersCopyright: Reuters

This year's Eurovision is surely probably the most political in a long time.

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

But this 12 months’s occasion is political for other reasons too. The Kalush Orchestra, the act which is able to represent Ukraine tonight, was not the nation’s original alternative.

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

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

Kalush Orchestra, a folk rap group from Western Ukraine, got their chance as an alternative.

Wearing traditional 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 just not a real country - 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 is more and more confident in itself.

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

A conflict predicated on the idea that this nation had no national identification, no foundational myths, no national heroes, no will to resist, is what's uniting Ukraine extra with every passing day.