You're reading: The Economist: The city beta-testing Ukraine’s revolution

Mykola Ridniy is a young video artist in Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Ukraine, just forty kilometres from the Russian border. His latest video, featuring peaceful street scenes set to a soundtrack of riots, recalls the events of two years ago, when the city nearly fell to the Russian-backed separatists who now control other cities in the south-east, Donetsk and Luhansk. Today, Kharkiv remains a litmus test for whether Ukraine can satisfy its Russian-speaking people and turn itself into a functional country.

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