A Russian-Belarusian rock band that denounced Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine returned to the stage this week to express defiance after being detained in Thailand in January and threatened with deportation to Russia.
Bi-2 formed in the 1980s in Belarus when it was still part of the Soviet Union, left the country in protest against the invasion, and have since toured countries with large Russian-speaking communities.
Ahead of Thursday’s concert in Vilnius, band members met with exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and the late Kremlin critic Alexei Supporter of Alexey Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison last month.
“We have become hostages of Russian history,” Egor Bortnik, one of the band’s two founders, told AFP ahead of Saturday’s concert in Warsaw.
But Boltnik, 51, better known by his stage name “Lyova,” said he was “not against the war.”
“On the contrary, I support the war. I just want Ukraine to liberate its own territory,” he said.
“Putin must call his beasts out of Ukraine,” Bortnik said, using a derogatory term often used by Ukrainians to refer to Russian soldiers.
The band was detained in Phuket, Thailand, in January on immigration charges, a case that has alarmed Russians who are critical of President Vladimir Putin living abroad.
The concert’s organizers said all necessary permissions had been obtained but that the band had mistakenly obtained tourist visas and accused the Russian consulate of launching a campaign to cancel the concert.
After a week in detention, the band members were released and traveled to Israel, where they met Foreign Minister Israel Katz, who said in a statement that the episode showed “music will win.”
In 2022, they left the country after several concerts in Russia were canceled after they refused to perform at venues with banners supporting the war in Ukraine.
“When the war started, I put my prosperity at risk and I had to leave Russia. It was unexpected, it was not a process we were prepared for,” Boltnik said.
Bortnik, who moved to Israel as a teenager, said he was more accustomed to immigration than some of his peers who left Russia after the war.
“I understand how difficult it is,” he said.
Boltnick said he was not a “geopolitician” and did not write explicitly “political songs,” although their lyrics could “hit a nerve that is constantly vibrating.”
He said Putin’s death could be sudden and violent and would also lead to the downfall of Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in power for three decades.
“If something happens to Putin, there could be civil war — the end of any tyranny,” he said.
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