“I was there!” I received him there, in Liberty Square, among other officials like me… » From his office in the historic heart of Kharkiv, protected by thick walls, this notable (he prefers to remain anonymous) points out the city’s main square, now mutilated and often deserted. On 1Ahem In March 2022, in the first days of the Russian invasion, a missile targeted the esplanade and hit the regional council, now closed and fenced off, like so many apartments, shops and public buildings. Kharkiv, Ukraine’s capital of hard sciences and breeding ground for engineers, is now the city of plywood.
“Putin, greeted with great fanfare in Kharkiv… When you think about it… » This figure Local reports on the Russian-Ukrainian economic forum of 14 December 2001, of which he was one of the organisers. President Vladimir Putin was the guest of honour. Political, economic and cultural figures from the city waited in the winter sun, young women dressed in Ukrainian costumes and embroidered shawls exchanged bread and salt with the Russian delegation, a sign of welcome in Slavic tradition.
On the paving stones, next to the Ukrainian flags, there is a large bouquet of white, blue and red flags, the colours of Russia. “The city of Kharkiv was not chosen at random,” Then the special correspondent of the first Russian channel points out from the Freedom Square. Putin “Here you feel at home. The weather is the same as in Moscow, a slight cold that makes your nose itch.” the journalist insists.
Perverse paradox
In 2001, Vladimir Putin has been president for a year and a half. This is neither his first nor his last trip to Ukraine. It is even the foreign country he has visited most frequently, after Belarus, a satellite state of Moscow, and Kazakhstan, two member countries of the Eurasian Economic Union founded in 2014. A matrix, he hoped, for rebuilding his “New Russia” project on the borders of the former USSR. Because for Vladimir Putin the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 was the “ biggest geopolitical catastrophe » of the XXmy century.
Ukraine would like to forget it: before the annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in Donbass in 2014, Vladimir Putin made twenty-one state visits to his neighbour, carefully recorded on the Kremlin website. “He opened the doors as if he were at home, in the manner of the tsars who formerly visited their subjects in the provinces of the Empire,” explains sociologist and philosopher Volodymyr Lupatsii, in the coworking space in the old centre of kyiv where he welcomes us.
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