Donetsk Region, Ukraine - Like many others in his cohort Sviatoslav Vakarchuk is doing what he can to support Ukraine's war efforts in defense of their territory. Monday, May 16, 2022, at a temporary military base inside a factory building near the Russian front in Donbas, Vakarchuk grabbed an office chair, set up his acoustic guitar, and poured out folk songs and rallying cries to dozens of Ukrainian soldiers. Many were either returning from the grueling fighting in the region or headed back to the front lines. He sang for around 40 minutes and took equally long to depart as soldiers crowded Vakarchuk for pictures and autographs.
"It's pretty cool. I'm impressed, actually," said Lt. Stanislav Kyslov, who a few days earlier had been part of a nighttime troop transport that came under fire after drones detected the convoy, according to Washington Post correspondents.
Sviatoslav Vakarchuk, for a while, has mixed music, social justice, and national politics, including serving two terms in Rada, Ukraine's parliament.
Known as Slava to his committed fans Vakarchuk, frontman for the band Okean Elzy decided to launch a solo tour to rally his country's spirits in the war against Russia.
Ukrainians are fresh off an achievement at this year's Eurovision award show. Ukrainian group Kalush Orchestra won honors in the Eurovision Song Contest—bolstering support for musics' power to unite and inspire.
Vakarchuk performed for workers Friday, May 13th, 2022, in the control room of the defunct Chornobyl nuclear power plant. Between several performances Monday for military personnel, he stopped in Bakhmut to shake hands with postal workers still getting the mail out in contested territory, only hours before a Russian missile struck a residential neighborhood in town.
During his performance, Vakarchuk urged Ukrainians to remain steadfast at a time when the momentum of the war appears to be shifting in their favor even as it intensifies in the east. He said Russia had attacked Ukraine because it feared "being infected by the "freedom gene."
"But we need to endure," he told the soldiers. "I am here to tell you that the whole country is proud of you. You are incredibly cool. No one believed that Ukraine could be like this. But today, I believe that Ukraine is a country supported and admired by the whole world."
Vakarchuck followed up his remarks with a message to Russian soldiers appealing to their conscience and urging them to resist further participation in a war already marked by widespread destruction and alleged war crimes.
"We can see Russian prisoners of war who say, 'I was just following orders,'" Vakarchuk said. "I want to say only one thing: Either you change the government that gives you those criminal orders, or you are accomplices to the crime."
His performances reached its apex with a song titled "City of Mary," which honored the besieged Ukrainian fighters inside the massive Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol as they ended their weeks-long stand. Vakarchuk said he had never been able to write a song on request until Sviatoslav "Kalina" Palamar, the deputy commander of the nationalist Azov Regiment, asked him to do so.
"Imagine their situation now: the difficult conditions, a lack of medicine and a bunch of wounded people, a lack of food and water, a lack of ammunition," Vakarchuk told the soldiers. "And he wants me to write a song. At that moment, I realized that a real warrior is different from a mercenary with a weapon in that he fights with his heart."
"Sviatoslav, he has a big mission with his songs and motivational speech," said Kyslov, 36, the lieutenant whose convoy came under fire.
Kyslov said Vakarchuk, with his varied career and stature now, seems to embody something unique for Ukrainians. His performance near the front seemed like an especially useful way to reach soldiers in his unit from Donbas. That region in eastern Ukraine has neighbors, and sometimes even families, who have divided loyalties between Russia and Ukraine.
"A lot of them come from small villages, small cities, and they need additional motivation to support the whole country," he said.
Comments