A campaign to “de-Russify” Ukraine is under way

AT A RECYCLING plant on the outskirts of Kyiv, a short drive from the site of a that killed 14 people (including Ukraine’s interior minister) a week earlier, a group of sorters, most of them middle-aged women, are ripping apart hundreds of Russian books. The cover of Tolstoy’s “Childhood, Boyhood and Youth”, days away from being reborn as a coffee-cup sleeve or an egg carton, goes into one garbage bag. The novel’s pages, destined to end up as paper for other books, in Ukrainian, or as cheap toilet paper, go into another. Next comes a selection of poems by Mayakovsky. Then a Soviet physics textbook. Then biographies of . And so on.