Crouched on the edge of Taras Shevchenko park in the frontline city of Kharkiv, 19 miles (30km) from the Russian border, the city’s vast Opera House resembles a battered spacecraft that has crashlanded after some epic intergalactic battle. The Kharkiv National Academic Opera and Ballet theatre (Khnatob) building, opened in 1991 after about 25 years under construction, is the largest theatre in Ukraine. Locally, it is nicknamed “the aircraft carrier”. The massive structure, with its overhanging upper storeys faced in volcanic stone from Armenia, was originally conceived, according to the company’s director of opera, Oleksii Duhinov, as a Communist party congress hall, with its 19×48-metre stage large enough to accommodate displays of military vehicles. But midway through construction it was reimagined as a theatre, on the insistence of an opera-loving member of the Moscow nomenklatura. Kharkiv’s opera house (right) is vast: ‘Just to maintain this enormous building costs a fortune,’ says the opera’s director, Oleksii Duhinov. Photograph: Anastasia Vlasova/The Guardian To compare the opera house to a ship or spacecraft may be fanciful – but …

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