‘Even If I Return To Belarus At 60, I Will Live To Fight Another Day’

Marharyta Liauchuk is speaking about a trip to the war, explosions outside the window, and her call sign.

“I am in the Regiment. My call-sign is Palekha,” this is how Marharyta Liauchuk, the opera singer who left Belarus in 2020, “opened up” her trip to Kyiv on Instagram. What does it mean — in the Regiment? And what does the trip of the Belarusian singer to the warring Ukraine mean? Mediazona received answers to these questions and found out why opera is “of no need” to anyone.

“I'm not ashamed of myself”. Revolution instead of opera

Marharyta was called to Kyiv by the Kalinovites — they just directly messaged her on Instagram almost from the beginning of the war. She finally got to Kyiv, where in 2022 she planned to move from Vilnius. The war began, the borders were closed for Belarusians, but Liauchuk did come to give a concert for the fighters. Without a side scene, in broad daylight, and with hair done by volunteers.

— They even prepared a dressing room for me, from which it took five minutes to walk to the stage — this is the longest way to the stage in my whole life.

Due to a trip to Ukraine, Marharyta had to cancel a concert in Lithuania (and lose her fee) — a performance with opera arias and an orchestra was planned.

The artist does not have many opera concerts now — due to a vocal cord injury, she had to cancel for several months. Marharyta does not regret the fact that her opera career stopped after 2020. There could have been more performances, but the singer ... does not want to.

— Many have a law degree, but not all work in the profession. I have a diploma as an opera singer — so I sing whenever I want to. I want to be called an artist, a free artist.

The artist adds that now is not the time for opera, and she is a “free person”, she can be creative, “breaking out of the system where 30 rubles were paid for a part.”

— I can sing, you know, Alyabyev's “Nightingale” — then I could sing such things like the aria “Queen of the Night”, and everyone goes “Wow!”, and there I am — standing on the stage, trying to figure out who the hell needs it. My pirouettes. After 2020 and after I left Belarus, opera and pirouettes don't make sense. In the “Queen of the Night” everyone is waiting for the F of the third octave — and you are like a circus performer: oh, look, oh, I got it, great. And what is behind this? My painstaking work — who needs it? I need to make Belarusian songs, something for the revolution, help someone — but what is all this for? Amuse people? Even sitting on the gold push, recording jokes, I seem to be doing more than just giving all those gigs around the world.

“You can run to a bomb shelter with wet hair. If you can make it”. Air Alerts

In Kyiv, the singer feels safe. The first air alert caught her at night. Marharyta posted a video with a siren in stories.

— I just got to bed when the siren worked. Yes, well, what to do? A friend bursts in saying “It's okay. Do you want ice cream?” I see that she is calm, everyone is calm and I would be calm. By the way, they ate Belarusian ice cream. In Kyiv. And recently, when I was in the regiment, 36 rockets flew — we hid. They took me to the bunker.

The apartment where Liauchuk stayed is located in the city center — more than once the singer heard explosions, flying shaheds, and air defense salvos. Marharyta speaks of air raid alerts as fortune-telling: “it will fall, it will not,” “to run, not to run,” and about hope: “everyone believes in air defense.”

“I’ll post the siren so that people can see how it happens.” You can run to a bomb shelter with wet hair. If you can make it. After a night in Kyiv, everyone is walking around sleepy, but they understand each other.

An acquaintance of Marharyta came under Russian shelling in Dnipro: she was sitting in a car next to the house where the rocket had landed. There was an explosion — debris fell — the airbag in the car went off.

It “became clear” for Marharyta why Ukrainians “react that way” to Russians and Belarusians after she had been thinking about the Russian missile.

“I’m lying during an air raid and I think, “Cool, I came to Kyiv, and missiles are being fired from my territory. They can kill me.”

In 2017, Marharyta was offered to go to concerts in the Crimea, but she refused.

— As I said before, “I am out of politics,” but even with my girlish brain I understood that this was a disgrace and a stigma for life.

Young veterans and the feeling that someone needs you. Concert in the Regiment

Marharyta's one and a half hour concert in the Kalinouski Regiment turned out to be “incredible and charged with sadness”. The singer refers to the fighters as “brothers-in-arms”, and calls them kittens. She says that the guys took a lot of pictures, hugged and some even managed to invite her on a couple of dates.

— I met a warrior in the regiment, who in 2021 wrote that he was in love. I then told him that I do not envy. He invited me for a cup of tea and now he said “I am a good friend of yours”, and we sat down for tea already in Kyiv.

Another came up and said, “Hug me tight, tomorrow we'll go to the front.” A concert for them to rest for an hour and a half, and in an hour and a half they will go to war, like my guitarist from Brutto. He told me the following: “Let's have a concert, like it’s the last one.”

There was a completely different energy — not the same people as those sitting in the theater, beautiful and waiting for the circus show to clap to. This is where I feel needed. You don’t just sing songs in the air and nail cadences. Can you imagine — the people need the song!

No spotlights, in broad daylight, I can’t describe it, can’t compare. How they sing along with you, how they listen, how they laugh at Krasnaya Zelen, how we changed clothes on stage — the fighters did my hair, a bouffant. “It’s not shooting,” I say — everyone laughs. It was necessary for the people who were there, it was important for them. For someone to come and stay with them.

And they responded to “Long Live Belarus!” in chorus. This really gave me goosebumps, it's so touching.

“It is important for them that someone come and stay with them.” How to help volunteers

When Marharyta first arrived at the regiment, she noticed how everyone froze — “a bunch of people” were sitting and waiting for her. She asked, “Do we have some sort of a hobby group here?” The fighters replied: “We are waiting for you: we will drink tea and talk.”

We talked for 4 hours. The Kalinovites asked a lot of questions: “How is Vilnius? Have you seen Sviatlana? And whom did you see? What do they say about us? How is the weather? Where were you, where did you go?” The singer also asked the fighters about their call signs.

“There’s a story behind each of them. And I didn’t have a call sign — they sat, thinking, the warriors offered “Grisha” or “Bouffant”. Let's be serious, I said. When I was a child, there were nicknames in my village and I had a grandfather Palekha, he is from Palesse. And I was Palekha’s granddaughter. And they started calling me that. If now someone writes to me, addressing with a call sign, I understand that those are the warriors. We became related, as if I were one of them.

The singer says that she faced the claims of the fighters to “those who are sitting out in Warsaw and Vilnius”, “not doing anything.”

— They can be understood. They told me “I can’t watch these stories where barbecues are fried.” We have a normal life, which they lived before the war. Everyone can be understood, but they see hell here every day.

They say bad things about the office, about somebody, something they have disagreements among themselves — I say, let's get together somehow, we don't want to hear that you are quarreling here. I am here, I am on my own, I have not joined anyone, I have my own mission.

Everyone has claims to each other, and I'm like Leopold the cat. Let's talk, someone needs to convey something — let's pass it on. I'll take private messages.

I want to do something for the fighters. And they say, “You're already helping.” I also read to them that people wrote to me on Instagram, asking me to send, for example, greetings from this or that neighborhood — they were extremely pleased.

How can you help them? They need people. So help in any way you can.

They need simple things. Understanding, caring, respect, listening.

For an ice cream on an armored personnel carrier

In addition to the concert, Marharyta had her own “program” in Kyiv: visit the wounded Belarusian volunteers in the hospital, go to Bucha, ride an armored personnel carrier — to go get an ice cream.

— The guys from the hospital wrote to me, I answered: “Guys, I will come”. There was this guy without a leg, and not only without a leg, he had a serious injury, he met me with the words: “Oh, hello, now we will tell you how we destroy those beasts”. Another guy has such an injury that he couldn’t laugh, but we were laughing and he asked, “Can you laugh for me plz?”

I arrived in Bucha: the ruins, the smell, which cannot be compared with anything, even after a year. This is scary.

What's next

Marharyta plans to come again with concerts, perhaps to go further than Kyiv. And she is already preparing for the New Year: she wants to record Belarusian carols.

She copes well with emigration: she helps herself with “deception” — she came up with the idea that the tour dragged on for so long. Once she already lived in Vilnius — when she came here to sing.

She does not miss Minsk or Brest, and explains this by the fact that her memories have become dull.

— I would come to my house in the village. See the graves of grandfathers and their ancestors. And so you live, breathe, no one breaks in the door, you react normally to the police. And not like in 2020 — you sleep in clothes, because they can come.

Even if I return to Belarus at the age of 60, I will still live to fight another day. I can’t leave Vilnius, because it’s close to the border there, so if anything, I’ll be the first to start.

Everyone says that the war will last long. In general, there are a lot of chickens among men. Why can a girl say that black is black, but some men can not? I feel so embarrassed for them. I don’t know, maybe everyone needs to be right, or ... to be sheep? Maybe you need to be a sheep? There are people who always stand for the bitter truth, that’s me. But there are a lot of weaklings. And it's hard for me, I'm such a ... man. I'm more of a man than some men.

No one taught us to fight, no one taught us how to make a revolution, but we do understand that we must fight evil, dictatorship, and Lukashenka.