African Union leader meets Russian president in Sochi to discuss food shortages; Zelenskiy claims forces are fighting back in Donbas
- ‘They are levelling everything’: Russians pound Donbas
- 100 days of war that is reshaping Europe
- Ukrainians begin to ask: could we have prepared better?
- Children among 800 hiding below Sievierodonetsk factory
- At a glance: what we know on day 101 of the invasion
From Odesa, Guardian correspondent Luke Harding reports on calls for a campaign of “de-Russification” once Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine comes to an end.
Ukraine has already twice dismantled Soviet-era state symbols. In the 1990s many Lenin statues were removed, including those in Odesa. Kyiv’s parliament embarked on a further round of “decommunisation” in 2014 after the Maidan uprising against the country’s pro-Moscow president, Viktor Yanukovych, and Putin’s annexation of Crimea and his war in the eastern Donbas region.
In Russian-occupied areas this process is going into reverse. In April Russian troops erected a new statue of Lenin outside the main administration building in the southern city of Henichesk, in Kherson province. They have torn down blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags from municipal buildings and hung Russian and Soviet ones in their place. This “re-Russification” is part of Putin’s attempt to erase Ukraine, Kyiv says.
Continue reading…
