The shrapnel-scarred Polovtsian statue was evacuated by volunteers from Velika Novosilka, a town in Ukraine's Donetsk region that today stands just 5 kilometers from Russian positions. The stone ...

To the south is the steppe where nomadic and semi-nomadic Turkic peoples such as the Pechenegs and Polovtsy, and later the Crimean Tatars, lived for centuries. To the northwest lies the Ukrainian city ...