How Putin lost hearts and minds in eastern Ukraine | Brian Milakovsky

The sham referendums serve only to highlight that many once pro-Russian Ukrainians are turning their backs on Moscow

Vladimir Putin has convinced himself that reunification" of south-east Ukraine and Russia is a historic inevitability - so obvious that it will warrant just a paragraph in the heroic textbook he's writing in his head. But the recent announcement by the Kremlin that the vast majority of the residents of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts voted to break away and join Russia is the product of an absurd fantasy. This is obvious to the region's war-scattered residents and even to myself, who spent the past six years working on humanitarian and development projects in Sievierodonetsk, the temporary capital of Luhansk oblast.

This is because this easternmost corner of Ukraine has always been where questions of its national identity and cultural entanglement with Russia are most laid bare.

Brian Milakovsky has worked in Ukraine and Russia on ecological, humanitarian and development issues since 2009. He and his family fled Ukraine after the invasion. They now reside in Latvia

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