Fans paid up to 160,000 rubles for Kanye West’s October concerts in Russia. Many are now asking how they can get a refund.

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The concert promoter, Say Agency, announced that the rapper Ye, also known as Kanye West, would perform on October 10 and 11 at Gazprom Arena in St. Petersburg, a venue that seats about 80,000 people. Ticket sales opened on the website yerussia2026.ru, where seats ranged from 9,000 to 160,000 rubles. The cheapest sold out within hours. Mash, a Telegram channel with ties to Russia’s security services, cited sources who said the contract with the rapper had already been signed and that payment for his Russian performance had been transferred.

Soon afterward, a screenshot of the ticket seller’s terms of sale began circulating on Telegram. It said the organizers reserved the right to swap in a different performer and keep the buyers’ money. Say Agency CEO Anna Subcheva called the clause a mistake. “We’ve already contacted the ticket operator ourselves and asked them to take that out of the terms, because Kanye West is definitely coming. We’re not talking about anyone else,” she told the Russian business news outlet Radio RBC.

Around the same time, lawmakers, activists, and pro-war Telegram channels began objecting loudly to the plans.

• Nikolai Novichkov, a State Duma deputy from the A Just Russia party, demanded that the rapper endorse Russia’s position in the war against Ukraine. “If even that doesn’t happen, I will raise the question of canceling the concerts,” Novichkov said. He also pointed to the rapper’s antisemitic remarks.
• Activists from the Orthodox movement Sorok Sorokov (Forty Forties) said they planned to review Ye’s repertoire again for “discrediting” the Russian military, “extremism,” and promotion of drug use.
• Vitaly Borodin, a professional informant, said he was drafting an appeal “to the relevant authorities and the Culture Ministry” demanding that the rapper’s concerts be canceled. He said the concerts amounted to “a slap in the face to our society.”
• Yekaterina Mizulina, head of the pro-censorship Safe Internet League, also weighed in. “Rapper Kanye West, an admirer of Adolf Hitler, is coming to Russia to perform,” she wrote on her Telegram channel. “Let’s just hope he doesn’t perform in a swastika T-shirt in Leningrad, a city that survived the siege.”
• Pro-war “Z” channels also criticized the plans. Dva Mayora (Two Majors), a Telegram channel with more than a million subscribers, wrote that Kanye West “has called himself a Nazi and raved about Hitler.” The post’s authors said they were surprised that “federal media are gleefully spreading the news as if it were some major cultural event.”
• Not everyone objected. Yelena Drapeko, first deputy chair of the State Duma‘s culture committee, said the musician deserved thanks for deciding “to come and perform for us amid the anti-Russian hysteria.” Ella Pamfilova, chair of Russia’s Central Election Commission, called Ye a talented man and said she would gladly go to his concert if she had the chance.

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Gazprom Arena said there was no rental agreement for Ye’s concerts and that the event would therefore not go ahead — even though the venue had earlier posted announcements for the shows. Say Agency said the concerts had not been canceled. Subcheva said Gazprom Arena had sent the agency a rental agreement. “We’re supposed to sign it by August 27,” she told the St. Petersburg news outlet Fontanka. She said she did not understand why the venue issued its statement.

Fontanka and Rotonda, citing sources, said senior officials had not approved Ye’s concerts. Fontanka said the organizers did not apply to the city’s culture committee for permission to hold the event. Under the usual procedure, the outlet said, organizers secure every approval and sign a rental agreement first, and only then launch an advertising campaign and start selling tickets.

• Vladislav Pozdnyakov, a “Z” blogger and the founder of the Male State movement, took credit for the cancellation of Ye’s St. Petersburg concerts.
• Borodin wrote on his Telegram channel that the cancellation was “a victory for all of society, which refused to put up with being spat in the face.”
• Mizulina captioned her post about the cancellation “I serve Russia.”
• Other theories about the cancellation circulated as well. Ivan Karpov, a sports journalist known for breaking insider news, said the decision to “ban this witches’ sabbath” came after a meeting between Gazprom head Alexei Miller and St. Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov. The reason, he said, was “complaints about the far-right views of this black fascist who idolizes Hitler.”
• The anonymous Russian Telegram channel VChK-OGPU wrote that the businessmen Mikhail and Yuri Kovalchuk were involved in the cancellation. According to the channel, “there’s no ban like that from Moscow yet.”

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Russian media and Telegram channels have since shifted to discussing how ticket buyers can get their money back.

Subcheva continues to insist the show will go on. “We’re putting on this concert,” she said. “Nobody has canceled it. It’s far too early to be talking about anything else.”

Gazprom Arena repeated that there had never been a rental agreement for the venue and that there was none now. It stressed that “the event cannot take place without a rental agreement.”

As of midday on August 25, Ye’s tour website still listed the St. Petersburg shows.