Swan songs - At Kharkiv's opera house, the show must go on

Crouched on the edge of a park in central Kharkiv, 30km from the Russian border, the city's vast brutalist opera house resembles a battered spacecraft that has crash-landed after some epic intergalactic battle.

- Charlotte Higgins

The Kharkiv National Academic Opera and Ballet theatre building, opened in 1991 after about 25 years under construction, is the largest theatre in Ukraine. Locally, it is nicknamed "the aircraft carrier".

The venue was conceived, according to the company's director of opera, Oleksii Duhinov, as a Communist party congress hall. But during construction it was reimagined as a theatre, on the insistence of an opera-loving member of the Moscow nomenklatura.

To compare the opera house to a ship or spacecraft may be fanciful but the scars of battle are all too real.

On 1 March last year, Russian missiles hit Kharkiv's main Freedom Square, severely damaging the city hall. Buildings for blocks around were affected - including the opera house. Over the following weeks, it had many of its windows blown out, was mauled by shrapnel and hit by debris from intercepted missiles.

Ukraine successfully defended Kharkiv. But missile strikes continue almost daily in Ukraine's second city, with air raid alarms frequent and visits to bomb shelters routine for residents.