“Even if you’re alone, you’re destined to do it…”

Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, 46, the lead singer of Okean Elzy and perhaps Ukraine’s biggest star, was supposed to be preparing to play the band’s latest album to packed venues across the world from April…

Since, he has sung in Odessa near the Duc de Richelieu monument commemorating the city’s founder, within firing distance of the Russian warships prowling the Black Sea, and to those sheltering in an underground station in Kharkiv, the eastern city where some of the worst shelling has been experienced.

Vakarchuk, known as Slava, played on a piano outside Lviv’s central station, a 50-minute concert for the refugees, for police and for military units facing daily Russian attacks. He has turned up at universities and key workplaces to inspire them to continue through the hell.

“It is just to make people feel that I am with them,” he said. “I haven’t counted I have probably sung in eight to 10 cities.”

On his visit to Kharkiv, Vakarchuk said he felt echoes of the German blitz of London during the second world war as he played to those hiding away.

“You can easily imagine this picture in the movies of you know, London 1941, when people were hiding in the subway during Nazi blitz and bombing,” he said. “The feeling is similar.

“The nation understands that probably there is nobody else who is going to fight this enemy. But even if you’re alone, you’re destined to do it and you don’t have any other choice because otherwise you’ll be ruined as a nation.”  

— The Guardian

Svyatoslav Ivanovich Vakarchuk is best known as the lead singer of Okean Elzy, arguably Ukraine’s most popular and successful rock band. He has long used his popularity to speak out about social and political issues. As early as 2008, for instance, he was ranked as one of Ukraine’s 100 most influential people by the Ukrainian magazine Korrespondent. Recently, however, he has further capitalized on his celebrity status to found the Voice political party. Campaigning on a pro-EU, antiestablishment, and anticorruption platform, that party recently won about 4% of the seats in the Ukrainian parliament. Vakarchuk himself now occupies one.  

…In 1991-1994 he followed in his family tradition and studied theoretical physics at Lviv University. In 1994, however, he joined an art rock band called The Silence Clan, which eventually became Okean Elzy. Vakarchuk writes many of the songs and is the lead singer.

In 1996, he did a postgraduate course at the Department of Theoretical Physics at the same university and moved to Kyiv after graduation in 1998.

In 2009, he wrote his dissertation on Supersymmetry of an Electron in a Magnetic Field and earned a Ph.D. in Physical and Mathematical Sciences from the Institute of Condensed Matter Physics at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

In addition to Ukranian, Vakarchuk also speaks Russian, English, and Polish.

For the entire profile on Svyatoslav Vakarchuk CLICK HERE.