Pop Culture Goes to War

Since Putin's invasion, the songs have gotten more serious, the comedy has gotten grimmer and any sense of kinship with Russia has died

- MICHAEL WASIURA

ON THE MORNING OF FEBRUARY 24, 2022, when Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian border and headed for Kyiv, Ukrainian pop star Jerry Heil, then 26, was best known for songs that were funny and self-aware.

"Okhrana Otmena," for instancewhich translates roughly as "You're Canceled" is about a boy who calls a girl the wrong name in bed. Other songs were about things like shopping and being a vegan.

"Now though, even when people ask me to perform my prewar stuff at concerts, I personally can't bring myself to do it," Heil told Newsweek in late March before a concert in the western Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk.

"It's a different time and culture has to reflect that difference. I have to reflect that difference, because I'm different now, too. I grew up a lot in the past year, right along with Ukraine itself." "I remember waking up about a minute before the first explosion and not understanding why I was so nervous," she said. "Then I heard the first bomb go off and was like, 'Is that fireworks?' I came to my window and literally saw the beginning of the war.

The sky was on fire." Heil was living in a rented house in a small town just north of Kyiv, not far from Bucha and Irpin, towns whose names later became bywords for Russian barbarity. She and her brother decamped to their childhood home and after failing to convince their parents to evacuate, set off for the country's Western border. As a male of military age, Heil's brother could not leave the country, but she did, carrying her music gear into Romania on foot.