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

ReutersCopyright: Reuters

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

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

However this 12 months’s event is political for other causes too. The Kalush Orchestra, the act which can characterize Ukraine tonight, was not the country’s authentic alternative.

That was Alina Pash, a 29-year-old rapper and former reality present 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, received their likelihood as an alternative.

Dressed in traditional outfits and drawing on the nation’s lengthy but repressed musical traditions, they are an implicit rebuke to the suggestion, oft repeated by Vladimir Putin, that Ukraine is not an actual country - but merely a "little Russia", a area that needs reintegration.

Tonight, when the Kalash Orchestra take to the stage, they will 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 warfare predicated on the concept that this nation had no national identity, no foundational myths, no national heroes, no will to withstand, is what's uniting Ukraine extra with each passing day.