Belarusian Opposition Flutist Kalesnikava: Russia's War Against Ukraine Is a War Against European Civilization

According to Deutsche Welle reports, Belarusian flutist and civil rights activist Maria Kalesnikava delivered a keynote speech at the Bonn Beethoven Festival on October 2, using her own experience of five years' imprisonment to reveal the systematic suppression of independent art by authoritarian regimes, and characterized Russia's war against Ukraine as a war against European civilizational values.

Kalesnikava was one of the key figures in the large-scale democratic protest movement in Belarus in 2020. Following the disputed presidential election on August 9 of that year, the Lukashenko regime violently suppressed the movement, which had peacefully sought democracy and freedom. She was arrested that summer and detained for five years, three of them in solitary confinement. Kalesnikava was recently released — a development she herself described as a miracle she had previously dared not hope for, attributing it to international diplomatic mediation — and is currently residing in Berlin at the invitation of the German government, recovering from physical and psychological trauma.

At the conference "Cultural Activities as Political Space?", supported by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, Kalesnikava stated: "A person's external freedom can be taken away — sometimes almost entirely. Freedom of movement, the right to connect with others, access to information — all of these can be restricted." But she emphasized that what has become part of a person's memory, imagination, and inner experience is difficult to control. She said: "Precisely for this reason, culture is essential to a free society, and authoritarian regimes are often distrustful of it." In her view, this explains why all dictators, from Stalin and Hitler to Putin and Lukashenko, hate independent art and culture, even when the latter is not overtly political.

In the subsequent panel discussion, Kalesnikava steered the conversation toward the Russia-Ukraine war. She stated: "People often ask: What exactly are we defending in Ukraine? Why do we need so much money and modern weapons? For me, the answer is very clear: the war that Russia has launched is not merely against Ukraine, but against European values and European culture, against our civilization." She added that when she heard the news of Russia's invasion of Ukraine from her prison cell in February 2022, she immediately recognized the deeper dimensions of the conflict.

Throughout her speech, Kalesnikava repeatedly emphasized that Belarus still holds more than 800 political prisoners. She regarded this as her own responsibility, calling for continued international attention to these human rights situations and to the importance and fragility of free artistic expression.

Regarding her prison experience, Kalesnikava recalled: "I spent a great deal of time in complete silence. But this silence was almost never empty, because music kept echoing in my mind." She connected her experiences studying flute and early and new music in Minsk and Stuttgart with her time in prison — Beethoven and Bach sustained her through those years. She also noted that musicians are all familiar with the state of having a melody or phrase that lingers in one's mind: "In normal life, this can even be annoying. In prison, I realized for the first time that it can bring immense happiness."

Steven Walter, artistic director of the Beethoven Festival, told Deutsche Welle in an interview: "Art and culture should not bear the responsibility of taking specific party positions or making explicit political statements. But art always creates spaces for encounter, allowing ambiguity to exist." He added: "Perhaps it is indeed so that there is something like a DNA of freedom in the nature of art."

The 2026 Beethoven Festival lasted four weeks, featuring more than 100 concerts and events and attracting approximately 35,000 attendees, the highest audience numbers in a decade. On German Unity Day, October 3, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Anja Bihlmaier, performed Brahms's "A German Requiem" to close the festival. During this closing weekend, more than 200 representatives from musical performance institutions and festivals across Germany gathered at the recently renovated Beethoven Hall in Bonn to discuss innovative forms of music and topics extending beyond the music industry itself.