Kharkiv citizens’ appeal to the International Community:

We speak on behalf of nearly two million Kharkiv people. Kharkiv is the second largest city in Ukraine, a hub of culture, education and technology.As well as the rest of Ukraine our city is a multiethnic and multiconfessional community. Here you can meet people speaking Russian (the most common language in any Eastern Ukrainian city), Ukrainian (it is Ukraine after all), Vietnamese (Kharkiv has its own little Vietnam), Dari (there are a lot of people from Afghanistan as well), Hebrew and Yiddish (a large Jewish community has lived in Kharkiv for a long time), Armenian, Georgian, Uzbek, Tajik, Mandarin, Cantonese, and many other languages. Our city has Orthodox churches and a Catholic church, a synagogue, a mosque and a pagoda. And we are proud to have here all this diversity.