genre rock

One night during the last week in February, a crowd of fans wrapped in Ukrainian flags gathered in front of the 4,200-capacity Tempodrom in Berlin to shop for keyrings and souvenirs with Ukrainian emblems and pose for pictures with a person dressed up as a dog that has become a symbol of the country’s war effort. Inside, before the band Okean Elzy took the stage, fans spontaneously sang part of the Ukrainian national anthem, which at least three-quarters of the people there seemed to recognize.
Okean Elzy (pronounced so it sounds like a duo of “Okee and Elzee”) has been one of the most popular acts in Ukraine for more than two decades, and in the three years since Russia invaded the country, both it and frontman Sviatoslav Vakarchuk have become symbols of its cause. As that cause becomes more urgent — and as the number of Ukrainian refugees who live elsewhere grows — the band’s music is also starting to resonate more outside its home market.

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Last year, the band released its first English-language album — the obvious but inexact musical comparison is Coldplay — and signed a global deal with Warner Music Group to expand its audience internationally. Now Vakarchuk, who goes by Slava, is using his stature as a popular musician to raise awareness of his country’s plight, without getting trapped in a morass of specific politics. In pop music terms, he is more akin to the Bono of 1983 — the white-flag-waving moral crusader for peace — than the Bono of 2003 who took meetings with lawmakers.

One of his goals is to show the West another side of the country they are supporting. “I don’t want Ukraine only to be associated with news from the frontline,” Vakarchuk says over a cup of coffee in a hotel lobby the next day. “We love sympathy, we love compassion, we love support, but we want people in the West to also to fall in love with something, and Ukrainian culture is a perfect thing.”

This raises an obvious question: What did he think of President Donald Trump’s car wreck of a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky? “Russia is the aggressor,” Vakarchuk says in an email, days after an interview in Berlin the day after the concert. “Ukraine is defending itself. We are sincerely grateful to the American people for all the help Ukrainians have received and are receiving.”

Vakarchuk needs to walk a tightrope of sorts — he was involved in politics years ago as a member of Ukrainian parliament and he founded the political party Holos (it translates as “voice” or “vote”), but he has retired from that. His politics were pro-Europe, which can be contentious in a country that has only been independent in its modern incarnation since 1991 and has been struggling with Russian interference or invasions almost ever since. “I treated politics as a public duty,” he says, noting he retired from it a half-decade ago. “I hate it as an operational thing. I have no taste for fighting for power.”

Vakarchuk seems to see music as the continuation of politics by other means — not only as an art form but also a way to influence the world. To him, “Music is the most influential thing that changes the world.” If rock bands and pop culture played at least some role in bringing down the Iron Curtain — and Bruce Springsteen’s 1988 concert in East Berlin might have played a significant one — why can’t Okean Elzy have some influence? Vakarchuk takes care to point out that he’s retired from politics — he wants the war to end, but he doesn’t want to go back to that. But at a time when rock barely tops sales charts, let alone topples walls, simply thinking that way sets the band apart from most of its peers.

That’s part of the reason the band started recording in English. Back in 2022, when Okean Elzy played Prague, Vakarchuk was recognized on the street by people who knew him less from his music than from his appearances on television news, where he sometimes commented on the Russian invasion. “Many of them said, ‘We love you and we support you, but we can’t understand what you’re singing,’” Vakarchuk remembers. The next day, the band decided to make an album in English. That required a global promotional push, which in turn required a big label that could match Vakarchuk’s ambitions. “I don’t only want to break the band in the West,” he says. “I want to break Ukraine culturally in the West.

This could be more important than it might seem. Americans and Europeans tend to see foreign military conflicts as remote — which, in geographic terms, the war in Ukraine is. But the conflict is essentially about whether the country can break out of Russia’s geopolitical orbit to move toward Europe politically. Having Ukrainian artists to admire might matter — especially since Trump seems to admire the raw power politics of Russian president Vladimir Putin. It could make a difference if Americans feel that Ukraine deserves not only sympathy but also support to achieve a peace deal that secures its independence.

“We Ukrainians most of all want an end to the war and a sustainable and just peace with security guarantees for Ukraine,” Vakarchuk says. “We are fighting to achieve this goal and we are grateful to everyone who supports us.”

For now, the band’s show comes with a good deal of patriotic flair, but much of that comes from the audience. “It’s an inevitable reaction to use your political tokens, like flags, to shout at the world — ‘We’re here! And we’re big and we’re strong,’” Vakarchuk says. But Vakarchuk hopes that both his band and his country will move beyond this. “When we are finally done with the war and we secure our independence and develop as a normal European nation, like Denmark or Sweden,” he says, “then the politicizing of events will go.”