Blue and yellow could be found everywhere as Ukrainians celebrated National Flag Day on Aug. 23, one day prior to Ukraine’s 30th Independence Day holiday, as war veterans raised Ukraine’s largest national flag on the territory of Kyiv’s National World War II Museum near the Motherland Monument. The flag is 24 meters long and 16 meters wide while the flagpole is more than 90 meters in height. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko delivered a congratulatory speech. At the same time, activists rallied in front of the Russian Embassy in Kyiv, where they installed 150 Ukrainian flags to symbolize the nearly 15,000 people killed in the Kremlin’s war in eastern Ukraine since 2014. In its eighth year with no end in sight, Russia controls 7 percent of Ukrainian territory, including the Crimean peninsula and parts of the eastern Donbas.
