Kharkiv on country’s eastern border has long had Russian-speaking majority but things are changing fast
, its usual contents now packed and evacuated for safety, a group of women sat in a row, smart and eager. Behind them, leaning back in his chair, arms folded, was a tall, gaunt figure in a military jacket and high-laced boots.
The military guy chipped in next, more fluently, saying that he would go by his army callsign. Think of a historical figure, he said: a leader of rebels. That made him Oleksa, after Oleksa Dovbush, an 18th-century outlaw of the Carpathian mountains. The surrounding countryside, albeit transformed by the appalling losses of the Holodomor – in which up to 4 million people died of starvation as a result of Joseph Stalin’s forced agricultural collectivisation policy between 1932 and 1933 – remained predominantly Ukrainian-speaking.
But in 2014, she said, after Russia’s unrecognised takeover of Crimea and parts of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, “I decided to use only Ukrainian in cafes, in shops, in the bank – everywhere. And many people tried to do the same.”
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