Meladze's source responded with an anti-war post to calls to revoke his citizenship because of the video from Dubai. A video has been circulated on the Web, where Meladze answers the viewer, who said “Glory to Ukraine.” The singer's answer is not heard. Parliamentarians called after that to deprive Meladze of citizenship. Meladze said that he did not want to hate anyone.
Singer Valery Meladze said that he dreams of ending the “antagonism” between “close peoples” and is ready to “give all his strength” for this.
“People, I want you to hear me and understand my words. For 10 months now, like many other people, I have been living with a feeling of heaviness and grief. It just so happened that the peoples I love dearly are in a conflict in which people are dying,” he wrote in his Telegram channel. “I can’t and don’t want to hate anyone and I’m not trying to please anyone.”
On January 2, telegram channels (for example, SHOT) published a video recorded, according to the authors of the posts, at a corporate party in Dubai .
The video was filmed by a man who says to Meladze behind the scenes: “Glory to Ukraine.” In response, the singer, putting the microphone aside, utters a short phrase – which one is not heard on the recording. A man off-camera greets him with an answer: “Oh, handsome.” After that, Meladze says: “Shh.”
Senator Elena Afanasyeva called the act of the artist “bestiality”, “ugliness” and “betrayal”. “Meladze should be deprived of Russian citizenship for supporting Bandera,” she believes. Elena Drapeko, First Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Culture, said that Meladze should “go away,” he should be recognized as a foreign agent and “he should be banned from entering Russia.”
According to the telegram channel Mash, the organization The “Army of Defenders of the Fatherland” appealed to the Investigative Committee and the Prosecutor General's Office and demanded that they give a legal assessment of Meladze's words and check whether he received citizenship according to the rules (the singer was born in Georgia, and at the time of the collapse of the USSR he lived in Ukraine).
Meladze was one of the first artists who spoke out against military operations in Ukraine. “Today something happened that could not and should never have happened. History will someday judge and put everything in its place. Well, today I want to ask you, I beg you to stop hostilities and sit down at the negotiating table. <…> People should not die, this should be stopped,” he said on February 24.
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