KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — 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.
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. It helps numb the nerve-shredding stress of combat.
“Russian soldiers drink vodka, we are making music,” says the rapper, whose real name is Viacheslav Drofa, a sad-eyed 23-year-old 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.
One of the ironies of the Feb. 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 blood of tens of thousands of Ukrainian dead and the misery of millions who have lost loved ones, homes, livelihoods and peace.
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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.
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In France, antipathy for all things German lasted a generation or more. 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 filled with bones of the dead.