amlet Zinkivskyi grew up speaking Russian in the city of Kharkiv, just like his parents. But when Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of“Unfortunately, I grew up speaking Russian, but it’s not pleasant to speak the same language as the army that is destroying whole areas of our country,” said Zinkivskyi, a 35-year-old street artist widely known to Kharkiv residents, who usually refer to him by his first name.
Back in 2014, there were separatist rumblings in Kharkiv, with some people looking to the swift annexation of Crimea and wondering if all of eastern Ukraine might not be better off inside Russia. But eight years of observing the miserable conditions in the Russian proxy states of Donetsk and Luhansk dampened those feelings, and Russia’s invasion has almost entirely extinguished them.
Three out of four of Kozhemyako’s grandparents were Russian, and during the Soviet era his passport listed his nationality as Russian. However, he said that ever since thehe had been a strong Ukrainian patriot and rejected the influence of Russia in Ukraine. The geographical and cultural variations inside Ukraine were one of the reasons why Putin and other Russian leaders tried to claim the country was an artificial construct. Instead, they now find their bloody invasion has done more than anything to bring the different parts of Ukraine together under a common identity, in opposition to Moscow.
Zagorodny said he had joined the territorial defence unit in his home town, south of Kyiv, in the first days of the war. He had spent some nights on a checkpoint and other days overseeing the construction of trenches.
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