UKRAINIANS NOW FIGHT WITH SONGS, PROVED THEY WERE MUSICIANS AND POISED WITH FOLK SONGS AND METALLICA BEFORE THE TERRITORISM WAR COMMENCED.

After Yurii Ivaskevych, 51, lost a leg when his unit came under shelling, he was recruited by another branch of Ukraine’s military: the Cultural Forces.


The members of the Cultural Forces, all professional musicians before the invasion, are now back at their craft, traveling across Ukraine’s increasingly pressured front lines to try to give people a flake of their old lives and some diversion from the grinding Russian assault. 

They play everything from Ukrainian folk songs to Metallica, tapping into a Ukrainian tradition of using music as a form of resistance to Russian rule.