‘Siding with the executioner’: Ukrainian official rebukes Danish director Lars von Trier for ‘Russian lives also matter’ Instagram post
Oleksiy Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, criticized Danish director Lars von Trier Wednesday after the filmmaker made an Instagram post reading “Russian lives also matter” in response to his country’s pledge to send F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine.
On Twitter, Danilov wrote that war is “not a film, where actors play at life and death.” He continued:
Behind every living Russian terrorist is a dead Ukrainian. The choice between executioner and victim becomes a tragedy when an artist chooses the side of the executioner. Ukraine doesn’t live in an abstraction but in a harsh reality in which Russians are killers. My simple advice to the famous director is to imagine that it’s his city that’s being hit by Russian missiles every day, his father or mother who was killed, his grandson who was deported to Russia, his wife who was raped by a Russian pillager, his home that was burned down.