"I was there! I received him there, on Freedom Square, in the midst of other officials like myself." From his office in the historic heart of Kharkiv, protected by thick walls, this notable figure (who wishes to remain anonymous) pointed to the city's main square, now mutilated and too often deserted. On March 1, 2022, in the early days of the Russian invasion, a missile targeted the esplanade and hit the regional council, now closed and sealed off, like so many apartments, stores and public buildings. Kharkiv, the Ukrainian capital of hard sciences and a breeding ground for engineers, is now a city of plywood.

"Putin, welcomed with great pomp in Kharkiv... When you think about it..." This local figure, who was one of the organizers, recounted the Russian-Ukrainian economic forum held on December 14, 2001. President Vladimir Putin was the guest of honor. Local political, economic and cultural figures waited in the winter sunshine, while young girls in traditional Ukrainian clothing and embroidered shawls exchanged bread and salt with the Russian delegation, a traditional Slavic greeting.

On the cobblestones, next to the Ukrainian flag-bearers was a large bunch of white, blue and red standard-bearers, the Russian colors. "The city of Kharkiv wasn't chosen at random," said the special correspondent for Russia's first TV channel from Freedom Square. Putin "feels at home here. The weather is the same as in Moscow, a light cold that stings the nose," said the journalist.

Perverse paradox

In 2001, Putin had been president for a year and a half. This was neither his first nor his last trip to Ukraine. In fact, it was the foreign country he visited most often, after Belarus, a satellite state of Moscow, and Kazakhstan, two member states of the Eurasian Economic Union founded in 2014. With this matrix he hoped to rebuild his "New Russia" project on the borders of the former USSR. For Putin, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20^th century.

Ukraine would like to forget it: Before the annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in Donbas in 2014, Putin paid 21 state visits to his neighbor, carefully listed on the Kremlin website. "He opened the doors as if he were at home, in the manner of the tsars once visiting their subjects in the provinces of the Empire," said sociologist and philosopher Volodymyr Lupatsii, in a coworking space in Kyiv's old center where he welcomed us. This late summer, Ukraine is undergoing the most massive attack since Russia invaded on February 24, 2022. In a perverse paradox, Putin is now destroying what he once knew and loved so well.

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