Last Monday, Oleh Synehubov was wearing a sharp suit with a neatly knotted mauve tie, sitting in an overfurnished room in the grand regional administration building in Kharkiv, and discussing his plans for his region’s next quarterly budget.
Five days later, he was giving a video address to citizens wearing combat fatigues, heralding the repulsion of Russian forces from Ukraine’s second-largest city, and announcing that anyone on the streets after 6pm would be “liquidated”, as the Ukrainian army attempted to weed out saboteur groups in the city.
