Ukrainians plan protest against Emir Kusturica’s Barcelona concert for alleged ties with Russia

On March 30, filmmaker and musician Emir Kusturica is scheduled to perform at the Palau de la Música Catalana with his band, the No Smoking Orchestra, as part of the Festival Mil·leni series of concerts organized by Concert Studio. Outside the venue that same evening, a protest has been called by the Ukrainian community living in Catalonia, who want the gig to be cancelled. 

Kusturica is a Serbian artist who has for years been a vocal supporter of Russian president Vladimir Putin. He signalled his approval of the military operation in Ukraine in 2014 when Putin annexed Crimea, encouraging Russia to “protect ethnic Russians living in Ukraine” in an interview with Russian news agency Tass. Kusturica would later defy the threat of sanctions from Ukraine and other western states by visiting annexed Crimea in 2017 to perform a concert there. 

In 2016, Kusturica was awarded the Order of Friendship by Vladimir Putin, one of the highest civil distinctions offered to foreigners in Russia. A year later, Kusturica praised Putin’s “gentle nature” while speaking to Russian state-backed media outlet RT, citing the president’s characteristic as the reason for the state of the country at the time. 

Just days before Russian forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it was reported by Russian media outlets that Kusturica had accepted a new position as the head of the Russian Army Theatre. Ria.ru also report that Kusturica accepted the offer for the position from Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, who highlighted "long-standing friendly relations” with the filmmaker and musician, as the ministry’s press secretary Rossiana Markovskaya is quoted as saying. In 2018 while performing at the International Army Games in Moscow, Kusturica dedicated a song to Shoigu.

However, since the full-scale war broke out in Ukraine, Kusturica has since denied he took up any permanent role with the Russian Army Theatre, but will instead oversee just three shows. Another Russian news outlet, m24.ru, quotes Kusturica’s explanation that there was confusion over the word ‘director’ in English and in Russian, and he says he initially believed the offer would only be to direct a small number of shows.

For Ukrainians living in Catalonia, this is not enough. Olena Romaniuk, one of the organizers of the protests of the Ukrainian community seen regularly in Barcelona’s Plaça Catalunya, says that Kusturica should be “banned” from performing at the Palau de la Música as part of Festival Mil·leni organized by the group Concert Studio.

She criticizes that Kusturica “supports all Russian imperialist acts” against nations such as Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine, including the “annexation of Crimea and the Russian aggression in Donbas since 2014.”

A letter sent by protesters to the Palau de la Música requesting the cancellation of the concert claims that the Serbian artist “justifies dictators” such as Vladimir Putin, Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus who made global headlines in 2020 for the widely disputed nature of the elections that year and brutal crackdown on protests that followed, and Slobodan Milošević, the former president of Serbia within Yugoslavia who died in 2006 in a jail cell in The Hague before the conclusion of his trial for war crimes including genocide could be concluded. 

The letter, sent by various associations such as Maidan in Barcelona, the Consulate of Ukraine in Barcelona, Associació RAZAM Belarusians of Catalunya and others, also criticizes the Palau de la Música for hosting this gig organized by Concert Studio while at the same time “hypocritically” placing a banner in support of Ukraine on the front page of its website. The letter says that promoting a concert such as this is a “shame.”

Concert Studio declined to comment for this article.

The Palau de la Música responded to Catalan News explaining that the concert is organized by an external promoter, Concert Studio, “but we are in contact and awaiting immediate statements from the artist to specify his positioning.”