A gravel road, framed by dense green bushes, leads our convoy to dark hangars. Cars parked here cannot be seen from the air. Light shines through a smashed roof onto SUVs painted dark green, their headlights masked. Sviatoslav Vakarchuk wears outdoor shoes, a pastel-colored T-shirt and a three-day beard. And for the first time that day his body armor. The soldiers on the eastern front carry their tourniquets, loops for stopping bleeding, at shoulder height, ready to hand. Vakarchuk’s performance here is the last of his tour today. And the most dangerous: Ukrainian positions in the Donetsk region are shelled on a daily basis.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has attempted to seize Kyiv in a blitz. His first attack failed, apparently he had not counted on the resistance of the Ukrainians. Now his generals are counting on large-scale shelling, on the complete destruction of cities like Mariupol, Chernihiv, Sievarodonetsk. They are counting on the Russian army having the staying power. The war is also directed against Ukrainian culture and identity: Expensive precision missiles hit Ukrainian museums, cultural centers and old universities. But it’s not just about buildings. In occupied territories, Russia forces the ruble to be used, children and families are brought to Russia via so-called filtration camps.
Music is part of Ukrainian independence. “Glory and freedom have not yet died from Ukraine,” reads the first line of the national anthem, written in 1862. Sviatoslav Vakarchuk, Ukraine’s best-known rock star, has been singing in Ukrainian for over twenty years. Since 1998 his band Okean Elzy has released ten albums. For the band’s 20th anniversary, they played in front of 75,000 people in the Olympic Stadium in Kyiv – it was the largest concert in Ukraine to date. Young people have been practicing Okean Elzy songs on the guitar since the 1990s. Street musicians sing his songs in Kyiv’s city parks. His life is closely intertwined with Ukraine’s independence: Vakarchuk played on the Maidan during the 2014 revolution, he founded a party and was advertised as a presidential candidate. He has been touring at the front for months, with a protective vest, helmet and guitar. He fights for independence in his own way. With Ukrainian soldiers he sings “Vse bude dobre” – “Everything will be fine.”
I saw Vakarchuk for the first time in May 2015: he unexpectedly came on stage at a concert of the band 5’nice in Kyiv. War had been going on in eastern Ukraine for thirteen months. Vakarchuk sang along with her hit “Yes Soldier”. “I am a soldier, a boy of war/ I am a soldier/ Mom heal my wounds/ I am a soldier/ Soldier of a godforsaken country/ A hero/ Tell me which novel is from.” A woman next to me in the audience had tears in her eyes Eyes.
Four years later, in the winter of 2019, I meet Svyatoslav Vakarchuk for an interview in the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament. In the meantime he had studied at Stanford and had entered parliament with his newly founded party Holos (“Voice”). He is clean-shaven, wears a dark suit and a white shirt with no tie, and speaks statesmanlike. He is planning a Normandy-style conference in Paris, he wants to “put the Crimea problem on the table,” explains his “red lines.” In the summer of 2020, a year after founding his party, he is leaving parliament again. In May 2022 he is a soldier. Eleven days after the start of the great Russian invasion, he joined the territorial defense of the Lviv region. He uploads videos of his missions to his social media profiles with a few weeks’ delay: Vakarchuk sings on the stairs of a subway station in Kharkiv, where people are hiding from bombs. Vakarchuk in a helmet and protective vest in a trench. Vakarchuk with a guitar and in a white protective suit in the control room of the liberated Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
We meet in a cafe in Kyiv. The waiters put on his music without being asked. Vakarchuk wears a loose, dark shirt. He used to go mountain biking in the woods. He also spent his 47th birthday the previous weekend in a trench near Kharkiv. After that he was at the front for four days. “Are the bets your art now?” I ask him in the café. “It’s definitely not art,” he replies. “I show them (the soldiers) that the whole country is behind them. I’m not just Slava Vakarchuk, I represent the whole nation in support of her. Even those who are not fans of Okean Elzy are happy.”
Before the war, he said in an interview, John Lennon’s Imagine was his manifesto. How does that relate to appearances at the front? “Monday you are a pacifist, Tuesday Russians come and kill your children and your family,” he says. “Keith Richards’ family fought in the war, so Keith Richards was able to write anti-war songs,” says Vakarchuk. “I would like my children to sing songs against war. But today is the time to win this war for our country.” Vakarchuk’s son will be one year old in the summer.
Kyiv in early summer 2022. Bridges, important buildings and viewpoints are secured with sandbags and checkpoints. Papers are checked in a friendly but careful manner, passport photos are compared with the face. Burned-out Russian tanks are on display in front of St. Sophia Cathedral. Young soldiers walk with their girlfriends in the city park, under the Arch of Friendship of Nations, on which a black crack has been painted. All that remains of the workers and farmers monument below is the base. Posters hang around the city commemorating the “Heavenly Hundreds”, demonstrators who were shot dead on the Maidan during the 2014 revolution. Despite the Russian rockets hitting homes a few weeks apart, the Kyiv people seem calm: they talk in Café Kashtan (“chestnut”) about how their relatives are doing in the occupied territories or their friends in the Front. They collect donations for Bayraktar drones on Instagram and plan their aid projects. Amazingly often there are Erich Maria Remarque books on the café tables. The Sloi Bar, where parties are held again, donates its proceeds to soldiers. Moscow Mule is now called Kyiv Mule.
To meet Vakarchuk at the front, we drive to Dnipro, a city 500 kilometers south-east of Kyiv. Soldiers sit in the wagon with us, along with families who are returning. The air raid sirens are louder in Dnipro than in the capital. Not just briefly, but for the entire time of the air alert. Curfew is from 11 p.m. In the evening, the street lights are turned off. “Svitlomaskuvannya” (“light masking”) means blackout in Ukrainian. Apart from sirens, the nights are silent. One can see the stars and hear the deep, regular rattling of heavy trains in the dark. Dnipro is a logistical hub for the southern and eastern fronts.
The checkpoints on the Dnipro eastbound road are larger and more heavily fortified than those in Kyiv. Sandbags and concrete blocks are piled up on the side of the road, and the Ukrainian flag over the checkpoints is no longer just symbolic. “Do you have any weapons with you?” a soldier asks us, looks into the car and waves us through. We slalom around heaps of dirt piled up to the left and right of the road for defense and take a detour around Pavlohrad – a few hours ago a rocket hit a field in the small town…
The sequel can be read in the current issue of ROLLING STONE