He did not cooperate with the Russian occupiers: the conductor Yuri Kerpatenko (1976 to 2022) was shot through the door of his house.
Image: archive
Russian occupiers shot the Ukrainian conductor Yuri Kerpatenko, who refused to collaborate with them. Meanwhile, Russia is sending its own cultural workers to the front as cannon fodder.
Dhe Russian invasion troops, who have repeatedly been accused of deliberately destroying Ukrainian cultural institutions, shot the conductor Yuri Kerpatenko in the occupied city of Cherson. Kerpatenko, who was also a bayan virtuoso and arranger, has been chief conductor of the Mykola Kulish Music Theater in Kherson since 2004. The 46-year-old musician, like many East Ukrainians, spoke Russian, he professed Russian culture, valued some oppositional Russian publicists, but wanted nothing to do with today’s Russia, which he described as a “concentration camp”.
On Facebook, he characterized his Ukrainian homeland as liberal in the broadest sense and explained to Russian friends that he did not want to be threatened with arms by Putin, who was craving for greatness, nor “rescued” and dragged into his secret service regime. This, as Kerpatenko wrote, formulated “in clear Russian” must have particularly angered the occupiers.