The Prosecutor General’s Office instructed the Moscow Prosecutor’s Office to check singer Valery Meladze for funding the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU). On this subject informed TASS in reference to law enforcement.
What was the reason for the inspection, is not specified.
Valery Meladze did not support them from the start of hostilities in Ukraine. In January 2023, Telegram channels broadcast a video of Meladze’s New Year’s performance in Dubai. On it, one of the fans asked the artist to say hello to his wife and said the slogan “Glory to Ukraine”. The response on the video is not audible, but the man who turned to the singer called Meladze “beautiful”.
After the video was published, Elena Afanasyeva, a member of the Federation Council, offered to deprive Meladze of Russian citizenship. The leader of the Just Russia – For the Truth faction, Sergei Mironov, advocated depriving the singer of all titles. State Duma Deputy Andrei Lugovoy asked Russia’s Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov to give a legal assessment of Meladze’s statements, saying the singer “allows himself to glorify a terrorist state.”
In March, an appeal to the Attorney General’s office writing Vitaly Borodin, head of the so-called “Federal Security and Anti-Corruption Project”. He said Meladze “repeatedly criticized” Russian authorities’ decisions regarding the military operation in Ukraine and also backed the nationalist slogan at a company party in Dubai. “Many citizens wonder whether the money earned by him (Meladze) at corporate parties in Moscow and Dubai will support the Ukrainian Armed Forces,” Borodin said in a statement.
Meladze himself said that he was not trying to please anyone and dreamed that “consent was established between close peoples.”
In the context of the scandal, the concerts of the singer scheduled for April were canceled in Russian cities. In the Titov-Arena concert hall in Barnaul, commenting on this information, Meladze was called a “prohibited artist”. Fontanka wrote in the summer of 2022 that Meladze was on the list of musicians whose performances were “undesirable” in Russia.
