Pink Floyd’s former front man Roger Waters called out a number of celebrities who are embracing Ukraine’s cause and siding with the “Kyiv regime,” saying they are “absolutely ignorant” of the history of Ukraine-Russian relations.
In particular, he singled out Hollywood stars Angelina Jolie and Sean Penn, and even his own former band mate David Gilmour, and panned them for their work aiding the weak and war-weary in Ukraine.
In an interview with Kremlin-guided news wire RIA Novosti published Thursday, he suggested that the West played a major role in Russia’s unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and that those celebrities were “clueless” about this.
In particular, he recalled that, in 1990, then-US Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “even one inch to the east” and suggested that NATO’s subsequent expansion somehow justified Moscow’s invasion of a sovereign republic.
“Angelina Jolie doesn’t know this. She’s never heard of James Baker. They’re ignorant,” Waters was quoted as saying. “And Sean Penn. They’re ignorant. And [U2 front man] Bono, and [Pink Floyd’s lead guitarist] David Gilmour, they’re all completely ignorant,” Waters said.
What Waters omits is the fact that Gorbachev himself denied in a 2014 interview that any such agreement was struck. Indeed, he said that the question wasn’t even raised at the time and the whole story was “a myth.”
In another interview given that same year to RBTH, a Russian government controlled news outlet, Gorbachev said: “The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up, either.”
It should be noted that Waters and Gilmour have feuded publicly, on and off, ever since the former departed the band in 1985 and Gilmour replaced him as the front man. The two rejoined in Berlin in 1990 for a performance of “The Wall” to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall eight months earlier. They reunited again in 2005, but the last time they appeared on stage together was 2011.
In his solo career, Waters has been vocal about geopolitical issues during his concerts, and on the global stage at large.
In 2023, he was invited by Russia to address the UN Security Council, in which he in fact condemned Russia’s “illegal” invasion, but also denounced “provocateurs” in the West who he claimed were somehow responsible for that invasion. Ukraine’ ambassador to the UN at the time, Sergiy Kyslytsya, called the speech “another brick in the wall” of Russian disinformation, a nod to one of the lyrics in “The Wall” album.
In the RIA-Novosti interview, Waters said that Jolie’s trip to Ukraine showed that she “knows nothing about the history and essence of the conflict.”
“I am sure that Angelina Jolie is absolutely clueless on this issue,” Waters was quoted as saying about the UN Goodwill Ambassador who, on her second visit to wartime Ukraine, visited Kherson in November after Russians blasted a maternity ward there. She spoke with medics, volunteers, victims and affected families.
Or, as the Kremlin-controlled news outlet described her visit in the Waters story: “Earlier, several Ukrainian media outlets reported on Jolie’s visit to Kherson, which is controlled by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, on a humanitarian mission. Kherson Oblast Governor Volodymyr Saldo, in an interview with RIA Novosti, called the Hollywood star’s visit to Ukraine an ‘anti-crisis’ designed to distract attention from the disaster at the front.”
For his part, Penn has visited Ukraine numerous times during the course of Moscow’s invasion, meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukrainian soldiers, and co-directing the 2023 documentary “Superpower” which follows Zelensky’s leadership during the war.
Penn set up a charity called Core Response, which provides financial assistance to Ukrainian refugees.
Zelensky awarded him the Ukrainian Order of Merit for his service.
Poles apart: the Waters-Gilmour divide
At the beginning of the invasion, Waters called then-US-President Joe Biden a “war criminal” who is “fueling the fire in the [sic] Ukraine” in an interview with CNN, and complained that NATO was “pushing right up to the Russian border.”
Gilmour, on the other hand, in April 2022 released a Pink Floyd track called “Hey Hey, Rise Up!”, which samples Andriy Khlyvnyuk of Ukrainian rock band BoomBox, with the proceeds going to humanitarian relief efforts.
He told the Guardian shortly after the release: “When I spoke to Andriy, he was telling me about the things he’d seen, and I said to him, ‘you know this has been on the BBC here in England, and on television around the world? Everyone is seeing these terrible things that are happening.’ And he said, ‘Oh really? I didn’t know.’ I don’t think that most people there have got such great communication and they don’t really understand that actually, the things they are going through are being shown to the world.”
“I hate it when people say things like ‘As a parent, I …’, but the practicalities of having an extended Ukrainian family is part of this. My grandchildren are half-Ukrainian, my daughter-in-law Janina is Ukrainian – her grandmother was in Kharkiv until three weeks ago. She’s very old, disabled, in a wheelchair, and Janina and her family managed to get her all the way across Ukraine to the Polish border and now they’ve managed to get her to Sweden,” he said.