Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters thinks Ukraine wants him up against The Wall. In a new interview with Rolling Stone, he claimed to be “on a kill list that is supported by the Ukrainian government.” The 79-year-old also called evidence of Russian war crimes “lies, lies, lies, lies,” and responded to accusations of antisemitism by arguing about the definition of antisemitism and railing against some Jews in the US and UK.
Waters has been eager to share his theories about Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Last month, he wrote an open letter to the First Lady of Ukraine asking that she and her husband “stop the slaughter” by surrendering all the territories that Russia had illegally annexed. Amid criticism that he was “blaming the party who got invaded,” as CNN’s Michael Smerconish put it, he followed up with a letter to President Vladimir Putin that asked for a promise not to “overrun the whole of Europe,” but with no mention of withdrawal from Ukrainian territory.
His new interview further expresses his view that Ukraine and NATO (which Ukraine is not a member of) are responsible for starting the war. “Russia should not have been encouraged to invade the Ukraine,” Waters said, aping Putinists who call the region “the Ukraine,” as if it were a part of a bigger whole and not a sovereign country.
He also reiterated his belief, last expressed in August, that President Joe Biden is a war criminal while Russia and China are relative innocents. “Of course, we — when I say we, I’m now speaking as a taxpayer in the United States — are not. We are the most evil of all by a factor of at least 10 times,” he said. “We kill more people. We interfere in more people’s elections. We, the American empire, is doing all this shit.”
Interviewer James Ball pushed back. A member of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that covered the NSA wiretapping scandal, Ball brought up evidence of Russian war crimes: “mass graves, the use of rape as a weapon of war, targeting humanitarian convoys, and more.”
Waters retorted, “You’ve seen it on what I’ve just described to you as western propaganda. It’s exactly the obverse of saying, Russian propaganda, Russians interfered with our election, Russians did that. It’s all lies, lies, lies, lies.”
