Lumen on the war

Lumen’s Position on the War in Ukraine

Following the launch of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the band failed to adopt an explicit, principled civic stance. On February 24, 2022, on VKontakte, Lumen published a generalized anti-war post, which was subsequently deleted:

For many years, we hoped and wished that the civil conflict in Ukraine would end in peace and mutual understanding. We feel deeply grieved that today the conflict has escalated to an entirely new level and our country is taking the most direct part in it. Until the very last moment, we had hoped it would not come to this.
Patience and endurance to everyone in this difficult situation! May the war claim as few lives as possible. May it end as quickly as possible!

On March 5, 2022, a post appeared on the band's Instagram announcing that "despite recent events, we decided that we will not cancel anything and in a few days will embark on the 'Show the Sun' tour":

Rustem Bulatov frequently delivers lengthy discourses from the stage and in interviews about war and peace, dwelling on the alleged class nature of all armed conflicts: the wealthy pump oil, while ordinary working people suffer. Such vague and evasive declarations allow the group Lumen to be claimed or classified into either camp. It is clear that Rustem Bulatov opposes war in the abstract, but who started the war and who is the actual aggressor nation in Rustem’s worldview remains deliberately unspecified. For instance, Zakhar Prilepin (a pro-Kremlin Russian writer and propagandist), analyzing the following words by Bulatov, characterized his stance as "intricate, yet ultimately for Russia":

What is happening now in Ukraine has not only split the entire world into unequal parts… It has also fractured our own society, Russian society… Because there are people, and quite a few of them, who believe that there was no other way to resolve the conflict in Donbas other than a military operation… There are also people who quietly or loudly say that all this is wrong, that troops must be withdrawn, that this is unacceptable… We have our own, third viewpoint on all of this, because what is happening in Ukraine didn't just start on February 24. It started back in 2014. And we needed some time to comprehend and process what was happening… And even then we tried to convey that there is nothing more terrifying than war. Please, let there be peace. But to our enormous surprise, the overwhelming majority of people in the world, an enormous number of people in our country and, most astonishingly, an enormous number of Ukrainians simply did not notice that conflict. It flashed somewhere in the news, something was said about it, but would anyone remember any demonstrations or protests with slogans like 'let's stop this,' 'this is wrong'? It started in 2014, and then for 8 years we lived with completely different issues and concerns. Completely. And to our profound regret, what we wrote back then in our song 'No One Will Stay Aside' began to come true. And I will honestly say, we wish none of this had ever happened, but now there is no way to alter or undo it…

Court Hearing Over the Song «Gosudarstvo» and Censorship

Despite the band's persistent attempts to sit on two chairs and their deletion of old anti-war statements, by the spring of 2026 the repressive state apparatus of the Russian Federation caught up with Lumen's creative catalog as well. In May 2026, it became known that the band's frontman had been summoned to court over the lyrics of their famous protest anthem «Gosudarstvo» ("The State", which contains the iconic lines «I love my country so much, and I despise the state»). An administrative offense report was drawn up against the musician accusing him of inciting hatred and enmity.

To avoid further trouble and official backlash, the track «Gosudarstvo» was subjected to censorship and completely purged from Russian streaming platforms.

Performances with Z-Artists

Today, the once-rebellious protest rock band Lumen has no qualms about performing on the same festival stages alongside overt proponents of the war, such as Ilya Chort (frontman of the band Pilot), Chizh & Co, and others.