“I was there! I received him there, at Place de la Liberté, among other officials like me… » From his office in the historic heart of Kharkiv, protected by thick walls, this notable (he wishes to remain anonymous) points out the city’s main square, now mutilated and too often deserted. On 1is March 2022, in the very first days of the Russian invasion, a missile targeted the esplanade and hit the regional council, now closed and sealed off, like so many apartments, shops, public buildings. Kharkiv, the Ukrainian capital of hard sciences and a hotbed of engineers, is now the city of plywood.
“Putin, welcomed with great pomp in Kharkiv… When you think about it… ” This figure locale tells of the Russian-Ukrainian economic forum of December 14, 2001, of which he was one of the organizers. President Vladimir Putin was the guest of honor. Political, economic and cultural figures from the city had waited under the winter sun, young girls in Ukrainian costume and embroidered shawls exchanged bread and salt with the Russian delegation, tokens of welcome in the Slavic tradition.
On the cobblestones, next to the Ukrainian flag-bearers, a large bouquet of white, blue, red standard-bearers, the Russian colours. “The city of Kharkiv was not chosen at random,” “, says the special correspondent of the first Russian channel from Freedom Square. Putin is “feels at home here. The weather is the same as in Moscow, a slight cold that stings the nose,” insists the journalist.
Perverse paradox
In this year 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 that he has visited most often, after Belarus, a satellite state of Moscow, and Kazakhstan, two member countries of the Eurasian Economic Union founded in 2014. A matrix, he hoped, to rebuild his project of “New Russia” on the borders of the former USSR. Because for Vladimir Putin, the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 is the ” biggest geopolitical catastrophe » you XXe 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 neighbor, carefully listed on the Kremlin website. “He opened the doors as if he were at home, in the manner of the Tsars once visiting their subjects in the provinces of the Empire”, explains sociologist and philosopher Volodymyr Lupatsii, in the coworking space in the old center of kyiv where he receives us.
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