“Miss those Fridays we used to have, kisses, twilights, refuse to sleep. “This is my lands, you boys should leave,” he sings, holding a rifle and dressed in combat gear in the track’s video on YouTube. Otoy dedicated his song, “Find My Country,” to Azovstal’s defenders – rapping in English with the aim, he says, of reaching “people all around the world.” He was a fighter with the Azov Regiment, among the units that clung doggedly to the surrounded plant for nearly three months, becoming an enduring symbol of Ukrainian resistance. His older brother, Dmitry Lisen, is missing, believed dead in the bombed-out ruins of Mariupol’s Azovstal steelworks. “It’s not just that I don’t like Russia, I hate this country, and I hate Russian people as much as I can,” he said in an interview in his Kyiv apartment, where he records and stores his guns and combat gear. Otoy says that if he has kids, he’ll do likewise, telling them, “the Russians were killing my family, killing my brothers, my sisters, bombing our theaters, hospitals.” “I will explain it to my children and I hope that my children will explain to their children.” “I hate them and, I’m sorry, it will never change,” she said. She broke down in tears as she explained how the growing reservations she’d had about Russia before the invasion have scaled up into rage. Iryna Osypenko was among concertgoers at a fundraising music festival last weekend in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, where Otoy gave a fiery performance. Putin, and in fundraising activism for the war effort. Otoy’s lyrics, with choice expletives directed at Russia and stark descriptions of Russian war dead, speak from the heart – he lost his older brother, a soldier, in the siege of the Azovstal steel mill in the devastated port city of Mariupol.īut they also give voice to the cold fury shared by many of his peers, now pouring out in song, in art, and tattoos, online in hashtags proclaiming, “death to the enemies,” and memes targeting Mr. In Ukraine, the young generation born after the country’s declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 likewise say they cannot imagine feeling anything but disgust for Russia for the duration of their lifetimes. Only in 1984 – four decades after Nazi Germany’s capitulation – were French and German leaders Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl able to stand hand-in-hand in reconciliation at a WWI monument in France. In France, antipathy for all things German lasted a generation or more. One country, two histories: What does it mean to be an American? Just as many people in France found it impossible to absolve Germany after two invasions a quarter-century apart in World Wars I and II, young Ukrainians say three-plus months of brutality have filled them with burning hatred for Russia. 24 invasion launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin is that in ordering the destruction of Ukrainian towns and cities, he is fueling one of the very things he wanted to extinguish: a rising tide of fierce Ukrainian nationalism, forged in the misery of millions who have lost loved ones, homes, livelihoods, and peace. “Russian soldiers drink vodka, we are making music,” says the rapper, whose real name is Viacheslav Drofa, a sad-eyed young adult who hadn’t known he could kill until he had a Russian soldier in his sights and pulled the trigger in the war’s opening weeks. It helps numb the nerve-shredding stress of combat. Ukrainian rapper-turned-volunteer soldier Otoy is putting the war into words and thumping baselines, tapping out lyrics under Russian shelling on his phone, with the light turned low to avoid becoming a target.
From the battlefronts of Ukraine comes rap music – filled with the anger and indignation of a young generation that, once the fighting is done, will certainly never forget and may never forgive.
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