July 8, 2016

Ukrainian opera singer killed while fighting in eastern Ukraine

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Vasyl Slipak

A Ukrainian opera singer who left the Paris National Opera two years ago to fight Russia-backed militants in eastern Ukraine was killed on June 29 by sniper fire.

The death of Vasyl Slipak, 41, was confirmed by Ukraine’s permanent representative to the Council of Europe, Dmytro Kuleba, in a Twitter posting on June 29. Media in Ukraine cited Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers in the Donetsk region as saying that Mr. Slipak was killed by a sniper near Debaltseve.

Born in 1974 in Lviv, Mr. Slipak was a member of the Dudaryk boys’ choir and was considered a musical prodigy. He graduated from the Lysenko National Music Academy. He began performing in France in the late 1990s and moved there in 1996. The baritone was invited to join the Paris National Opera, where he sang for almost 20 years.

By 2011, he was at the top of his field, winning the prize for best male performer at the Armel Opera Competition and Festival in Szeged, Hungary, for his rendering of the Toreador Song from the opera “Carmen.”

In 2014, Mr. Slipak returned to Ukraine and joined volunteers fighting combined Russian-separatist forces in the country’s east. He adopted the nom de guerre “Meph,” a reference to the aria of Mephistopholes from the opera “Faust,” renditions of which won him fame in France.

The New York Times cited an interview with Hromadske TV in which Mr. Slipak had said he was inspired to serve his country by the popular uprising on the Maidan. “Ukraine can become a successful country and a major player on the political stage if we start heeding the voices of the people,” he said in the interview.

In that same interview, Mr. Slipak, sporting a traditional Kozak hairstyle, is seen singing the Ukrainian song “Misiats na Nebi” (Moon in the Sky), while loading bullets into the magazine of his gun.

Ukrainian journalist and military expert Yuriy Butusov wrote on Facebook of the attack in which Mr. Slipak was killed: “It was an attack launched from Debaltseve. First, militants launched artillery attacks on Ukrainian soldiers, then they used tanks and infantry. Slipak had only a Kalashnikov gun. The sniper also shot and injured another two soldiers.”

On July 1 the coffin bearing Mr. Slipak’s body was carried through the streets of Lviv as Dudaryk sang. A funeral liturgy was offered at Ss. Peter and Paul Garrison Church, and burial was at the famed Lychakiv Cemetery. Thousands of Lviv residents came to pay their respects to the famed singer-turned-soldier.

President Petro Poroshenko posthumously awarded Mr. Slipak the Order for Courage. Kyiv residents brought candles and flowers to a makeshift shrine on Independence Square.

Memorial services were held in Paris, at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of St. Volodymyr the Great, as well as in Rome, home to a large community of recent arrivals from Ukraine, at Ss. Sergius and Bacchus Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church.

Sources: RFE/RL (based on reporting by hromadske.tv and depo.ua); The New York Times; The Washington Post; Ukraine Today (with information from Yuriy Butusov); Marta Osadtsa, writing for Svoboda.

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