Coommentators at the final of the Eurovision Song Contest on May 13 kept repeating how normal the host city of Kyiv appeared. However, with a travel ban imposed on the Russian entrant, who had performed in the annexed peninsula of Crimea, the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine left a clear mark on the event. The human and political costs of this war have been high: the total death toll is about 10,000; some 1.8 million inhabitants of the Donbas region have been displaced inside Ukraine; and about 1 million have fled to Russia.
Russia's War Against Ukraine
OP-ED
Gwendolyn Sasse: The two parts of Ukraine’s Donbas
People walk past pro-Russian separatists as they rehearse with their tanks for the Victory Day parade in central Donetsk on May 3.
