 "Why is Antony Blinken facing criticism for playing guitar in Ukraine?")
Politicians holding guitars frequently please the public. However, when US secretary of state Antony Blinken picked up a red guitar at a basement bar in Kyiv to play Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World on Tuesday (14 May), he received a lot of flak. He was in Ukraine on a surprise visit, his fourth since the conflict with Russia began in 2022.
But why did his guitar playing and song choice raise eyebrows?
Messaging went wrong
“I know this is a really, really difficult time,” Blinken told a packed crowd in Kyiv in the subterranean club Barman Dictat on Tuesday night.
“Your soldiers, your citizens, particularly in the northeast in Kharkiv, are suffering tremendously,” he said. “But they need to know, you need to know, the United States is with you, so much of the world is with you. And they’re fighting not just for a free Ukraine but for the free world, and the free world is with you, too.”
In an attempt to send a message of defiance and hope, Blinken along with the local group The 1999 broke into Neil Young’s hit song Rockin’ in the Free World, ostensibly to encourage Ukrainians to keep fighting Russia and holding on to their Western aspirations.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsOn the same day, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy cancelled all of his upcoming foreign trips due to a series of battlefield setbacks.
Blinken’s message was not well received by the public.
Young’s 1989 song, with the refrain Keep on rockin’ in the free world, appears to be an homage to the glory of living in the West, free of communism and authoritarianism. Indeed, as numerous social media critics have pointed out, the song is a lament about despair and misery brought on by homelessness, drug addiction, and poverty in the celebrated free world.
A charitable interpretation could be that Blinken chose to perform the song to emphasise the importance of overcoming adversity by remaining true to one’s dreams of peace and freedom. After all, that had been the overarching theme of his remarks at Kyiv events since his nearly pre-dawn arrival after an overnight train journey from Poland, and it would continue to be on Wednesday.
“I’ve come to Ukraine with a message: You are not alone,” Blinken had told an audience of students and educators at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute shortly before taking to Barman Dictat’s basement stage.
“Never bet against Ukraine,” he said at a Wednesday news conference with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba.
‘Ill-timed performance’
But some Ukrainians have reacted angrily, chastising Washington’s top diplomat for an ill-judged jam session in the capital while Ukrainian troops are fighting in trenches, struggling to hold back a Russian advance amid a shortage of weapons.
“One word is enough to describe US secretary of state Antony Blinken’s evening in Kyiv yesterday: inappropriate,” said Svitlana Matviyenko, head of the Agency for Legislative Initiatives NGO.
Blinken is on a surprise trip to Kyiv weeks after Washington approved a $61 billion (Rs 5.09 lakh crore) package of aid for the country following months of delays in Congress.
In a speech earlier on Tuesday he said the United States would back Ukraine until its security was “guaranteed”.
Ukrainian lawmaker Bogdan Yaremenko, a former diplomat and MP from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s party, said the performance was ill-timed, coming after delays to US aid cost Ukraine lives and territory.
“The message is not hard to understand, but it’s not getting through,” he said in a Facebook post.
“With all due respect, it’s a mistake. The message is wrong,” said Valeriy Chaly, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States from 2015 to 2019.
Blinken dismissed the criticism
At the same time, Russian troops were advancing near and around Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, and Zelenskyy was preparing to postpone a planned trip to Spain and Portugal later this week to deal with the crisis.
Oleksandr Kraiev, director of the North America programme at the Ukrainian Prism think tank, said Blinken’s visit was welcome, but he and many Ukrainians were perplexed by his two-day stay, which included a visit to Barman Dictat, which some saw as inappropriate given the current fraught wartime climate.
“From my point of view, and generally speaking from the point of view of common Ukrainians, it was not a very appropriate sign to go to the bar to have a small song with our band,” he told the Associated Press, noting that Ukrainian military recruitment officers are known to go to bars and nightclubs to check documents and catch draft dodgers.
“So (for the) secretary of state of the United States also to go to a bar, to have a small concert for people who are blamed for not enlisting in the Ukrainian army,” Kraiev said, “it’s not, let’s say, a catastrophe, it’s not a faux pas, but it’s something that is not very desirable from the point of view of common Ukrainians.”
US officials with Blinken dismissed online criticism of the secretary’s song choice and decision to sing at a pub. They also stated that he would not have participated in the event if he had considered it inappropriate. More broadly, the potential disconnect between the week’s battlefield developments and Blinken’s optimism was reflected in his actions and the size of his delegation.
With inputs from AP and AFP
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