The tragic death from a sniper’s bullet of an opera singer-turned-soldier on the front line in eastern Ukraine made international headlines. Social media were filled with accounts of Vasyl Slipak’s life and death; condolences were offered by Ukrainians around the world – particularly those who knew him in France, where he lived for two decades, and in Lviv, where he was born.
The Washington Post’s poignant story written by Jack Losh noted: “Amid the thud of artillery and rattle of gunfire, Vasyl Slipak’s deep, resonant voice in the trenches of eastern Ukraine was a warm reminder of humanity’s less barbaric traits. The professional baritone had left his native Ukraine in the 1990s to settle in France, where he regularly sang at the Paris Opera. But after war erupted in 2014, he decided to return home and join a volunteer battalion to fight Russian-backed separatists on the country’s eastern front. …But at about 6 a.m. Wednesday [June 29], his voice was permanently silenced. As a deadly surge in violence left Ukraine’s fragile ceasefire in tatters, the 41-year-old opera singer was killed by a sniper and became yet another victim of this grinding war of attrition on Europe’s far-eastern fringes.”
Mr. Slipak, known in his battalion as “Meph” (a reference to one of the arias he was known for performing, that of Mephistopholes from “Faust”), was not a professional soldier, but a professional opera singer. What motivates a gifted singer to give up everything and choose to go to the front line? Those who knew him say Vasyl Slipak was a great Ukrainian patriot who wanted to defend his homeland. He told Hromadske TV that he was inspired by the events on the Maidan and believed fervently that “Ukraine can become a successful country and a major player on the political stage if we start heeding the voices of the people.”
Before he headed to the war zone, he was active in diaspora rallies supporting the Euro-Maidan and in collections of humanitarian and financial aid. In addition, he enlisted his friends in the opera world to make Ukraine’s case to the French public, and was instrumental in organizing public conferences on the developments in Ukraine for media, scholars and policy-makers. And then he headed to Ukraine’s east.
Mr. Slipak’s death came just days before the NATO summit in Warsaw, on the eve of which U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited Kyiv. Speaking on July 7 at a joint press conference with President Petro Poroshenko, Mr. Kerry said, “Ukraine is making a good-faith effort to implement Minsk, no doubt in my mind about that,” but he added, “without real security in the Donbas, an end to the bloodshed on the contact line, the use of heavy weapons, the blockading the OSCE access, without that, Minsk is doomed to fail.” He pledged that sanctions against Russia will remain unless Moscow fulfills its Minsk obligations.
Meanwhile, the number of casualties in this Russian-made war keeps growing. Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, while in Washington at the end of June, made it clear that Minsk is not working. The Washington Post quoted his words about the Russian military in Ukraine’s east: “Every single day they kill Ukrainian soldiers, every single day the death toll is rising, every single day we’ve got civilian casualties. There is no ceasefire on the ground.”
Mr. Slipak was yet another of the nearly 9,500 killed in this war, including some 2,000 civilians, according to the United Nations. Among them are so many of Ukraine’s finest young people – those who would have been the country’s future. Also among them is one of our own, Ukrainian American Markian Paslawsky, another member of a volunteer battalion. (He will be remembered next month on the second anniversary of his death on August 19, 2014.)
Journalist and military expert Yuriy Butusov described Mr. Slipak as “the epitome of a citizen and patriot.” Ukraine’s Minister of Infrastructure Volodymyr Omelian, a personal friend of Mr. Slipak, eulogized him: “He didn’t just sing – he was a hero of the stage. And he fought the same way… He loved his friends and was fierce with his enemies. Ukraine flowed through his veins.”
We join Ukrainians around the globe in mourning yet another hero’s passing. Вічная пам’ять. Герої не вмирають. (Eternal memory. Heroes do not die.)