It’s three years yesterday (February 24) since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, and to mark that sad anniversary, U2 have shared a message and a piece of music in support of the country and its leader, President Zelenskyy.
You can see the Instagram message below. In it, Bono reads out My Friendly Epistle, a poem by Taras Shevchenko, accompanied by piano. The singer said that he and The Edge had previously sent the recording to Zelenskyy himself in 2022, shortly after the initial invasion.
“All who believe in freedom and sense the jeopardy we Europeans now find ourselves in are not sleeping easily on this, the third anniversary of the invasion,” he wrote in the caption. “More to say about this and other bewilderments later.”
U2 have rarely been shy of taking a stand when it comes to human rights. Recently, Bono penned an op-ed in The Atlantic magazine in which outlined his thoughts on how to achieve freedom “in every part of the world where health and humanity are at risk”.
Bono wrote about the idea of ‘freedom’, how it has meant different things across time and across nations and how the need for freedom has been expressed continuously in music.
“When we rock stars talk about freedom, we more often mean libertinism than liberation, but growing up in the Ireland of the ’60s, that had its place too,” he wrote. “We were mad for freedoms we didn’t have: political freedom, religious freedom, and (most definitely) sexual freedom.
“Rock and roll promised a freedom that could not be contained or silenced, an international language of liberation… In U2, we wanted our song Pride (In the Name of Love) to sound like the freedom we were campaigning for in our work with Amnesty International. That’s how insufferable we were.”
The article appeared just before the singer was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Joe Biden in January, the highest civilian honour in the US, for being “a pioneering activist against AIDS and poverty.”
Meanwhile, the Ukraine war moves into its fourth year after a week which has seen talks in Saudi Arabia between Russia and President Trump to end the conflict, talks which Ukraine was excluded from.
