![]() ![]() ![]() In 2011 the Kremlin expelled him from the country in the first case of its kind since the Cold War. A former Moscow bureau chief, he has written three books for Guardian Faber about Putin’s Russia. ![]() Luke Harding is an award-winning foreign correspondent with the Guardian newspaper and is reporting from Kyiv at the moment. The city trembles.įor more on the background to the war, and especially Vladimir Putin’s disastrous legacy for Russia: It feels like something out of a movie or a poem - but it is real. My grandfathers fought the German tanks on tractors, literally. When I think of the Russian troops arriving at the bay, I imagine them in their heavy gear, trying to huff and puff up the stairs, with Ukrainians throwing molotov cocktails, and stones. Odessa is a city of good humour, where 1 April is the most important holiday - more celebrated than even Christmas - the holiday of ‘kind humour’. I looked online and saw a video of regular people - accountants and dock workers and short-order cooks - gathered around the base of the stairs, building fortifications for the inevitable invasion of the city by Russian troops. This morning, my cousin in Odessa wrote to say he woke up to an air-raid. These days, I ask myself if I will be able to come back - or not, given the circumstances. Odessa is a place I return to quite often. It’s famous for the Potemkin Stairs, a long staircase running from the bay to the city. I was born in Odessa, a city on the steppes of Ukraine, bordering the Black Sea. ![]()
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