How Musicians Use Their Cultural Identity to Fight

When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Nadia Shpachenko had to endure two tragedies.

“The war started on my birthday, so I was crying all night,” said Shpachenko. This was the first tragedy – the start of a brutal war and a violent bombing of her home city, where her father remained during the initial attack.

The second tragedy was a loss that has lingered. For centuries, Russia has been stripping Ukrainians of their language and culture. But in that moment, Shpachenko and her companions were ready to fight back.

“Lewis Spratlan was a very close friend and colleague, and he was in the last stages of his life. He wrote most of his piano music for me,” said Shpachenko. “He called me the next morning after the war started, and he said, ‘I want to write a piece about this war, and I want to kill Putin with it.’”

In November 2024, Shpachenko told this story of emboldened artistic grief to her audience at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York City, where she played a concert of forgotten 20th century Ukrainian pieces, representative of a Ukrainian culture rising from the ashes.

This is how Shpachenko plans to kill Putin herself: insisting on her heritage by playing the music that Russia tried to destroy.

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Ukrainian musicians are trying to maintain the memory of an ongoing, brutal war. Since the start of the war, over 6.7 million Ukrainians have been forced to migrate away from their homes, wondering how to preserve the identity of Ukraine. The response for Ukrainians has been an embrace of music connected to Ukrainian identity and an increasingly politicized purpose behind their branding as artists.

For hundreds of years, Russia has reduced Ukraine through cultural condescension, according to Simon Morrison, a professor of music at Princeton University who studies the former Soviet Union and Russia.

“If you watch a comedy show in Russia, you see Ukrainian spoofs in terms of how they speak and their accents,” said Morrison. Russian narratives have perpetuated stereotypes portraying Ukrainians as linguistically and socially rustic, as “rednecks.” 

As a reaction to the repression, a repertoire of Ukrainian folk songs arose. Now, Ukrainian musicians are reclaiming these ancient songs as a defiant response to the Russian repression of Ukrainian heritage.

“You’re seeing this incredible effort from the Russians to obliterate anything to do with national cultural identity – archival collections, institutions – to leave Ukraine as a wasteland,” said Morrison.

Folk music is at the core of a resistance within an artistic-cultural battleground. Though, as the war continues, artists have been experimenting with old music to create a distinct, modern Ukrainian sound.

“There’s been an explosion of musical practices. One main reaction to the full-scale invasion was to make more music and to repurpose old music,” said ethnomusicologist Maria Sonevytsky.

Ukrainian group Kalush Orchestra won the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest. Their hit song “Stefania” is a representation of folk music changing amidst the war. This modern hip-hop track merges rap with traditional Ukrainian flutes and folk vocal hook. The song’s music video depicts a soldier in war trying to save her daughter and garnered over 73.3 million views on YouTube.

“The melody itself is from a very traditional province in southeastern Ukraine, but it’s taken a life of its own,” said Stephen Benham, president of Music in World Culture who frequently visits Ukraine for music development projects. “When I went to Ukraine, singing and leading the camp with the kids, they were trying to play ‘Stefania’ on their violins. It was a way of protesting, but also expressing Ukrainian identity.”

This reinterpretation of folk music has also functioned as a mode of global solidarity. Shortly after the invasion, the lead singer of Ukrainian rock-pop band BoomBox stood in front of the Saint-Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv and sang an early 20th-century song associated with military resistance. The clip went viral on social media after remixes by various artists, including Pink Floyd, across the world.

As a downstream effect of the full-scale invasion, Ukrainian musicians have access to an unprecedented global platform, especially in Western Europe and North America. The most popular music by Ukrainian artists has been about the war and Ukrainian identity.

“Ukrainian musicians who had huge platforms at the very beginning have smaller platforms now, as the world has gotten tired of the war in Ukraine. They’re finding new methods to call attention to their various causes,” said Sonevytsky.

Ukrainian artists have taken to the trend of political pop, looking to new hot-button social causes for their work. Jerry Heil who represented Ukraine in the Eurovision Song Contest 2024 released “#AllEyesOnKids” in August, singing about Ukrainian children illegally stolen and deported by Russia.

“Some of the musicians that have been in Western Europe since they left in 2022 have started to develop deeper networks there, cultural institutions that were inside of Ukraine have migrated elsewhere,” said Sonevytsky. “It was a necessity for survival and also a real tragedy.”

The audiences that Ukrainian musicians have drawn abroad span beyond just Ukrainian migrants, extending to resident Western European audiences who stand in solidarity with the political cause and preserving Ukrainian culture.

“Ukrainians abroad will go to concerts because it connects with them,” said Vitaliy Bolgar, a Ukrainian guitarist and singer-songwriter whose family sought refuge in Germany. “Other people come because Ukrainian music is so beautiful. They actually begin to sing Ukrainian songs in the Ukrainian language. It’s influencing the overall fabric of Europe… at a heart level.”

Globally, Ukrainian music has also become inseparable with political messaging. While many artists had been promoting this cultural identity long before the war, the politicization of Ukrainian artists and their heritage has become their default branding in the industry.

“Ukrainians, when they’re heard, are typically heard at moments of political volatility,” said Sonevytsky. “I’ve seen the trend to some degree, that Ukrainian musicians feel strongly that they want to keep making music like before, that doesn’t necessarily have a political message.”

A return to old music has served a political cause for many artists, but at its core still functions as a personal, therapeutic device.

“These songs were about the experience of being alive and the suffering one has. There was no sense of nation when they were created,” said Morrison. “It’s a part of the texture of life. Ukrainian art is fundamentally about the smaller epiphanies, the profundities of individuals.”

The return to folk music and other traditional art forms marks a broader renaissance of the Ukrainian identity and its community – reviving personhood and lost historical traditions.

“You’re trying to communicate how you’re feeling about your country, to other the people who don’t know you. Folk music is a very important way of letting people know what you’re going through,” said Bolgar.

Traditional music forms have functioned as a healing source for traumatic events across migrant communities. Culturally centered music is gaining recognition as a therapy protocol for migrant trauma patients, according to the National Institute of Health.

Ukrainians, through the rediscovery of musical traditions and a creative burst in various art forms, are finding a collective identity and sound. But in the process, they have found themselves dependent on Europe and North America not just for arms during the war, but also for an audience who will empathize.

The cultural battle that Ukrainians and their leaders fight today has taken on a tone of bitter desperation, dependent on the recognition of a continuing war that the media and the international audience are losing interest in.

“Today, culture must be at the front for victory,” said Ukrainian minister of culture Mykola Tochytskyi to the Ukrainian parliament in June. “In addition to our own efforts, our struggle is on the front lines, and the preservation of cultural identity needs increased support from our foreign partners. International assistance depends, not least, on understanding the motives and goals of our struggle. We need to communicate to our friends well, so that they know who we are, what we are for, and why we are there.”

The rediscovery of Ukraine’s cultural identity is not just the return to folk art traditions, but a crucial political tool. If Ukraine’s story falls out of the global conversation, they risk losing foreign aid and attention, and in turn, the loss of their nation. The legacy, livelihood, and future of Ukraine all depend on a sympathy-inducing narrative, one embedded in their cultural history—that Ukraine deserves to be saved.

“There’s no drones up there in Europe and in the US. Your skies are quiet. You don’t have to worry about things coming at you, attacking you, or falling on you. It adds to a level of stress, and that also comes out in the music.” Bolgar told me, calling from his house in Kyiv. “We sit here in shock that we’re watching a major war of the 21st century.”