Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city and a major target of Russia’s invading forces, has a special place in the Kremlin’s edition of history. which characterizes it as that place. Which shows the stupidity of Ukraine trying to stay away from Russia.
As Russian troops crossed the border just 20 miles from the city early Thursday, residents reported loud explosions, apparently caused by artillery shells or missiles landing on the city’s outskirts.
Closer to Russia than any other major Ukrainian city, Kharkiv has long been the home of President Vladimir V. Putin has grown up in the view that Ukraine is no more than an appendage of Russia. Which has been unjustly snatched away by the tricks of foreigners and misguided Ukrainian nationalists.
When protesters in Kiev toppled Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor F. Yanukovich in 2014. So Kharkiv became the center of a Russian-orchestrated effort to rally opposition to the new government in Kiev and restore Mr. Yanukovich to power. The deposed president fled to Kharkiv, where the then mayor, Henady Cairns, hosted a conference of pro-Russian politicians and officials from largely Russian-speaking regions in the east and southeast of Ukraine.
This effort, supported by Russian agents and agitators from across the border, quickly failed. But it generated several of the propaganda tropes now being deployed by the Kremlin: the claim. that Ukraine is annexed by neo-Nazis; That the Russian-speaking mortals of Ukraine are in danger. Ukraine exists as a country only as a result of foreign interference.
Kharkiv, for a long time a melting pot of various ethnic groups, included a large Jewish population. played a particularly important role in shaping Ukraine during and after World War I. It served as the first capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. which was largely Moscow-controlled. The unit established in Kiev in opposition to the Ukrainian People’s Republic, which sought to secede from Moscow and declared an independent Ukrainian state.
Occupying Kiev in February 1918, Soviet forces based in Kharkiv quickly crushed this initial effort by the Ukrainian state.
In a lengthy historical essay on Ukraine published last July, Mr. Putin cited this ambiguous episode as “an example of doomed, foolish attempts to establish a Ukrainian state by the various quasi-state formations that emerged in the former Russian Empire.” “
This history, Mr. Putin added, sent a clear message to Ukraine’s current leaders: “To those who have today relinquished full control of Ukraine to outside forces. It would be instructive to remember that, in 1918, such A decision proved fatal for the ruling regime in Kiev.”
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