“Without the AFU [Armed Forces of Ukraine], so bad,” Mykolai Sierga sings as he sits on a log in the Lviv region strumming a Martin guitar, surrounded by fifty Ukrainian soldiers. 

It’s a little after 6 pm, and Ukraine’s recent heat wave means everyone is sweating. As the television and rockstar-turned-war performer strums the refrain, the soldiers, a motley crew of paunchy, middle-aged men in their 30s to 50s, laugh. 

Kolya’s pale blue eyes scan the audience for clues. The 100^th brigade of Ukraine’s armed forces is days away from being redeployed to eastern Ukraine for another onslaught with the Russians. The mood is somber, and the smiles forced.

Sierga is watching the soldiers’ body language. “If they look down or close their eyes, that’s positive. They’re going to a place inside of them, a place of reflection,” he said. 

Today, Sierga performs three twenty-minute concerts for the forces. They’re informal, but there’s a pattern. Kolya’s lineup includes three songs plus poetry he declaims about home. He refuses to sing others’ songs. Everything he sings is something he wrote. Above all, Kolya considers himself a poet and an artist.

I push him on this point. Wouldn’t it be better to sing the iconic folksong “Chervona Kalyna” or something that people know and can remember when they’re in stressful situations on the front?

“No,” he replies. “While the songs are new, I have thought about every word and image and a line will stick with them.”

The 100^th brigade is sick of war. They just want to go home. 

Volodymyr, a forty-four-year-old solider from Volyn who volunteered one day after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, tells me that speaking with his son daily and alcohol keeps him sane. Ukrainian soldiers get thirty days of annual home leave, but after more than 800 days of fighting, their nerves are wearing thin.    

Ukraine’s recent mobilization law should give soldiers like Volodymyr a reprieve. The law lowered the conscription age from twenty-seven to twenty-five and gave Ukrainians more certainty about their obligations. All Ukrainian men were required to report to the recruitment office by mid-July 2024 for a document check.

As a result, more Ukrainian men know their days of freedom are numbered. Thousands have gone abroad, often swimming across rivers or bribing border guards. After the new mobilization law was passed, more Ukrainian men decided to volunteer rather than wait around for the inevitable conscription notice. Volunteering has its advantages. A soldier can choose his brigade if he volunteers. If conscripted, he has no choice. 

The word is out. Ukrainians are a clever lot and know which brigade commanders respect human life and which commanders act more like the Russians. The brigades with good leadership have waiting lists, while the ones with poor leadership lack recruits. 

Sierga has entered this complex world. The prematurely grey-haired singer who lived a large international life for more than a decade never expected to end up back in Ukraine, and he never expected to spend his thirties in fatigues singing to soldiers. But he couldn’t be more content. 

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, Sierga’s life was one of endless music tours, glamor, selfies, autographs, and physical stunts. Sierga lived the high life in Moscow until 2017. The Odesa native had hit it big time and never looked back. 

After Russia seized Crimea in 2014, Sierga did nothing. He stayed in Moscow and ignored Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assault on his homeland for years. To his great shame, he even performed in Russian-occupied Crimea.  

Then came February 24, 2022, and everything changed. Sierga, the son of a math teacher and a military officer, knew what he had to do. He enlisted the next day and traded his guitar for a gun. 

His marriage to a Russian citizen was an early casualty of the war. 

He ended up in an infantry brigade and began to sing at night when other soldiers experienced insomnia. Soon, Kolya received many invitations to sing to other units.  

From these experiences, the Cultural Forces of Ukraine were born. 

General Valery Zaluzhny, the first commander of Ukraine’s Armed Forces during the full-scale war, gave Kolya a mandate, mission, and resources to establish his troupe.   

Now, the Cultural Forces harness the power of the arts to bolster the spirits of Ukraine’s soldiers. With nine touring groups, Cultural Forces of Ukraine gives about twenty shows daily on Ukraine’s front lines and in rehabilitation hospitals across the country. 

But Cultural Forces is more than a group of professional traveling musicians who entertain and encourage troops, and Kolya is more than a tattooed diva. Cultural Forces seeks to combat Russian narratives about Ukraine and Ukrainians and keep the fight going for Ukraine’s liberation. 

I ask Kolya how he sees himself. 

“A propagandist,” he says with a laugh. 

But the thirty-five-year-old isn’t kidding. In October 2023, some clever pro-Ukrainian graffiti caught my eye in a Zaporizhzhia alley. Two cartoon cats, one in a uniform and the other in civilian clothes were holding hands, united. Under the cats, “RAZOM” (together) was written in all caps. Subtle it was not, but after more than two years of war, subtle doesn’t work.  

Then, I began to notice more cat graffiti and pro-Ukrainian images across eastern Ukraine. 

The cat graffiti wasn’t a one-off initiative. The Cultural Forces were behind it. Altogether, Cultural Forces have spraypainted 850 murals in eastern Ukraine.  

Kolya spends much of his time recruiting injured soldiers to lay down their weapons and pick up their instruments.  

Olga Rukavishnikova, a sturdy violinist who was wounded five times during the war, is one of his recruits. Kolya finally convinced her to leave active military service and perform. With her violin pressed to her cheek, the eye patch over her left eye infuses her songs with even more pathos. 

Yuri Ivaskevych, call sign “Pavarotti,” was an opera singer before the full-scale invasion. Yuri lost his left leg from the knee down after stepping on a land mine near his hometown of Zaporizhzhia. After he was wounded, he was inert. Music revived him.  

When Yuri belts out Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” with a thick Russian accent, there’s not a dry eye in the crowd, and the trivial observation that Vladimir Putin is killing Ukraine’s best gains an ugly realness.  

Kolya himself doesn’t dwell on what he’s built. He’s got too much to do. He’s days away from the start of a forty-day tour to the United States that is meant to sustain U.S. support for Ukraine.      

“I could be making millions of dollars in Moscow. Instead, I am here. And there’s no place I would rather be.”

Melinda Haring is a senior advisor at Razom for Ukraine and a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. She tweets @melindaharing. 

Image: Bumble Dee / Shutterstock.com.