Ukraine Folk Artists Harness Music to Fight Russian ‘Assimilation’

Ukraine’s DakhaBrakha ensemble starts the performance at the Parisian Cabaret Sauvage venue with the greeting “Good evening from free Ukraine,” before singer Marko Halanevych, cellist Nina Garenetska, keyboarder Iryna Kovalenko and percussionist Olena Tsybulska launch into the evening’s program.

With identical traditional peasant blouses and layers of necklaces, the group’s three women could pass for sisters. Their tall black hats resembling stove pipes, however, are just a fun prop with no actual roots in Ukrainian folklore.

“We’ve been suffering from Russia’s assimilation policy for three hundred years,” said Halanevych.

After “so many tragic episodes,” added the trained philologist, “it’s a miracle that Ukrainian identity, culture and language still exist.”

Much of modern Ukraine’s territory was part of the Russian empire under the tsars and then the Soviet Union following the Bolshevik Revolution.

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Many Western analysts believe that President Vladimir Putin long dreamed of absorbing Ukraine into Russian territory even before the February 2022 full-scale invasion. 

In conversation, the singer’s fatigue becomes apparent. He admits to being tired, not just from the group’s ongoing tour taking it to France, Switzerland, and Luxembourg, but also from the strain brought on by Russia’s war on his country.

DakhaBrakha’s concerts are interspersed with reminders of the conflict, and part of the proceeds go to the national war effort.

“We are aware of course that people in Europe are tired of hearing about it,” said Halanevych. “We understand, and we don’t judge.”

After a two-year break due to the Russian invasion, DakhaBrakha, which has been around for two decades, resumed touring. Mostly abroad, but sometimes at home.

Last spring, the quartet performed in Dnipro in the east of the country – where the gig was interrupted three times by air raid sirens – as well as in Chernivtsi, Odesa, and Vinnytsia. 

Next month, it is planning its first studio session since 2020 in Kyiv, which they call “an important and symbolic choice” of location.

The folkloric repertoire has seen a resurgence in Ukraine over the past decades, with ethnomusicologists often recording elderly women to preserve the heritage as faithfully as possible.

But DakhaBrakha is not shy about lacing  central European polyphonic traditions with thumping bass lines, distorted electric guitars and vocal lines akin to rapping.

Their concerts, which have taken them across Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, sometimes have moments of “disconnect” as news from home abruptly bursts into joyful performances via alarm signals from Ukraine flashing up on their smartphone apps.

“Each time we worry about our loved ones,” said Halanevych.

The quartet’s frontman is the first to acknowledge that weaponizing music may not be enough of a contribution to the war effort indefinitely, given that Ukraine is finding it increasingly difficult to recruit soldiers.

“We may need more people to take up arms or dig trenches,” he said. “I am ready to defend my country.”

Halanevych’s brother Taras, 37, a journalist and sound engineer, already began his military training last month.