The crowds don’t just cheer.

to stage Eurovision with a distinctly Ukrainian flavor, decking out the English city in blue and yellow Ukrainian flags.Even before the full-scale invasion, Ukraine used Eurovision for cultural diplomacy, as a way to tell the world about their country’s history, music and language. Ukrainian singer

won the contest in 2016 — two years after Russia illegally seized Crimea — with a song about the expulsion of Crimean Tatars by Stalin in 1944. Kalush Orchestra’s winning song “Stefania” blended rapping in Ukrainian with a haunting refrain on a traditional Ukrainian wind instrument.Now the message is that Ukraine is still standing, and still fighting.Daniil admitted to feeling a “little bit of pressure” ahead of Saturday. But he said it was “such a privilege” to represent Ukraine.

“We have two missions here,” his brother Valentyn said. One is to come out at or near the top in Saturday’s 26-nation musical showdown. The other is “to remind Europeans about the war.”As part of its Eurovision journey, the band is fundraising to buy robotic de-mining systems to help clear an area of Ukraine he says is 3 1/2 times the size of Switzerland.

Ziferblat’s trip to Eurovision coincided with Vyshyvanka Day — the third Thursday in May, when Ukrainians around the world wear traditional embroidered shirts as a symbol of national pride.

The band members joined scores of Ukrainians clad in elaborately stitched vyshyvanka in a Basel park to eat borscht, sing Ukrainian songs and cheer on the band ahead of Saturday’s final.Surviving a marriage with an unfaithful, abusive husband, she essentially raised three young children on her own. Rana developed several successful businesses and eventually got into politics, telling her kids to use their platforms to make an impact.

“She’s a blueprint of my strength. Watching her carry the weight of the world with such elegance, you know, was really inspiring,” Gurung said. “The way she built the world around us, unbowed, unapologetic, was, I would say, my first lesson in resilience.”The book’s title and cover are a purposeful nod to the designer’s love of women. “Walk Like a Girl” was something kids said to tease him at school.

“I just didn’t understand it as an insult in the beginning because I think ‘Great, I’m like my mother, my sister, all these women.’ ‘Wonder Woman’ was my favorite action hero, and ‘Charlie’s Angels,’” Gurung said.He decided to reclaim the phrase and chose his strength pose for the cover in honor of Rosie the Riveter and other “iconic, feminist women.”