“AS I set off on a spring journey into the world, my mother embroidered my shirt with two colours: red for love and black for sorrow,” goes a popular Ukrainian song. On May 25th, as Ukrainians went to the polls to elect Petro Poroshenko as their new president, many sported the traditional shirts embroidered with red and black threads. Held in the middle of a war stoked by Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and three months after a revolution in Kiev’s Maidan that led to more than 100 deaths—and cost the country Crimea, which Mr Putin annexed—Ukraine’s presidential election was an act of defiance as much as an expression of political preferences.The sense of nationhood that emerged from the Maidan revolution produced long queues at the polling booths. “We are not just choosing a new president. We are choosing a new country, where everything depends on us,” said Oksana Selezneva, a 24-year-old IT specialist. The energy of voters was directed externally as much as within. As one put it, “Every vote cast is a slap in the face for Mr Putin.” The goal was to show that Ukraine could function as a nation-state. The terror unleashed by separatists in the eastern industrial Donbas region aimed to...
from The Economist: Europe http://ift.tt/1gDYeQv
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