The war in Ukraine lives on in songs. According to Interpol

There is a wounded soldier, somewhere in the snow. His family are waiting for him at home, but he will not be returning. All around him, there is only blood and silence. ‘Wounded Soldier’, the Interpol track featured on the band’s latest album, ‘This Mirror Weighs a Ton’, released on 28 August, draws inspiration from drone footage and content relating to the Russia-Ukraine conflict shared on social media. “How horrific it is that you can log on and witness the final moments of a soldier’s life,” explains Paul Banks, the band’s lead singer. “You can’t become desensitised to these things. Perhaps it’s the old cliché of being a parent, of feeling how precious every life is, but it’s all so sad.”

For years, Banks has looked primarily inwards, singing about loneliness and depression. With this track, he looks outwards, towards the world and the war ravaging Europe. It is one of Interpol’s first openly political moments and the beginning of a broader story: that of how Ukraine has entered the international music scene in recent years. Whilst in 2022 there was an urgent need to react and make one’s voice heard against the Russian invasion, the following years saw the emergence of personal stories, collaborations with Ukrainian musicians, and images and music videos from the front line.

In February 2026, U2 released ‘Days of Ash’, a six-track EP centred on wars, death and contemporary political crises. The final track, ‘Yours Eternally’, is inspired by Taras Topolia, lead singer of Antytila and a Ukrainian soldier, and features Ed Sheeran on vocals. It is written as a letter from the perspective of a soldier on the front line. The track harks back to a meeting in 2022, when Bono, The Edge and Topolia performed together in Kyiv, in a metro station that had been converted into an air-raid shelter. Ed Sheeran had also collaborated with Antytila four years earlier on an alternative version of “2step”. Topolia had written and sung his part in Ukrainian whilst engaged in territorial defence.

In 2026, the second instalment of the War Child project, “HELP(2)”, was also released, featuring Arctic Monkeys, Depeche Mode, Pulp, Fontaines D.C., Olivia Rodrigo, Beck and others. The project supports War Child’s work on behalf of children affected by conflict around the world. In 2024, Within Temptation released “A Fool’s Parade” in collaboration with the Ukrainian musician Alex Yarmak. It is a song about war, propaganda and the manipulation of information, with a video filmed in the Ukrainian capital. Kate Bush also returned, indirectly, to the theme of war. ‘Snowflake’, a song from 2011, forms the basis of ‘Little Shrew’, an animated short film made in 2024 about children caught up in conflicts. The project came about after the start of the Russian invasion, and the film is set in a landscape ravaged by war. The song had not been written for that occasion, but it is precisely the war that has given it a new meaning.

In 2023, Imagine Dragons told the story of 14-year-old Sasha in their song ‘Crushed’, a survivor of five months of Russian occupation of his village, Novohryhorivka, in the Mykolaiv region. In the video, he walks amongst the ruined houses. Meanwhile, the American singer-songwriter Brad Paisley released “Same Here”, a track featuring a spoken-word segment by Volodymyr Zelensky.

Then there is the more melancholic case of the Scorpions, who in 2022 changed the lyrics of ‘Wind of Change’. Instead of references to Moscow and Gorky Park, the band had inserted ‘Ukraine’: ‘Now listen to my heart / It says Ukraine’. A song that had become a symbol of the end of the Cold War was thus transformed into a musical commentary on another European war.

A few days after the invasion on 24 February 2022, Andriy Khlyvnyuk, lead singer of Boombox, left the US tour and returned to Ukraine. From Kyiv, he recorded an a cappella version of ‘Oi u luzi chervona kalyna’, a Ukrainian patriotic song. David Gilmour came across that video and decided to build a new Pink Floyd song around it. This is how ‘Hey Hey Rise Up’ came about, released in April of that year.

Sting has re-recorded ‘Russians’ for guitar and cello; the song was written in 1985, when the United States and the Soviet Union were facing each other across the specter of a nuclear threat. The Finnish band The Rasmus have also re-recorded ‘In the Shadows’ together with the Kalush Orchestra, winners of the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest, transforming it into ‘In the Shadows of Ukraine’.

In 2022, the music scene was reacting to the war almost in real time. Four years on, however, the way it views the war has changed: drones, maps, reels, Telegram notifications, images that flash by and are immediately replaced by others. “This is not a show, this is how it goes”, sings Banks. It’s not a spectacle; that’s just how it is. But perhaps today, music is simply asking us to look on without ever stopping to see.