The prosecutor’s office will check Valery Meladze on the subject of financing the Armed Forces

The Moscow Prosecutor’s Office will begin an investigation of the singer Valery Meladze on the subject of financing the armed forces of Ukraine. This is reported by TASS with reference to law enforcement agencies. The interlocutor of the agency clarified that the instruction to conduct the inspection was received from the General Prosecutor’s Office of Russia.

In March, Vitaly Borodin, the head of the public organization “Federal Project on Security and Combating Corruption”, appealed to the Prosecutor General to check the singer. He suggested that the fees from Meladze’s speech could, in his opinion, be transferred to the support of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Valery Meladze criticized the Russian military invasion of Ukraine. During the New Year’s performance in Dubai, someone from the audience shouted from the hall: “Glory to Ukraine!”. Meladze, moving the microphone aside, answered: “Glory to the heroes.” The recording of this moment went viral on social networks. Into the microphone, he asked the audience to stay out of politics.

Meladze clarified on his Instagram that he is against any wars. He wrote that he is not trying to please anyone and has been living “with a feeling of heaviness and grief” for ten months, because his “dearly beloved nations are in a conflict in which people are dying.”

After that, the artist started having problems. His planned concerts in Russia were repeatedly canceled “for technical reasons”. The leader of the “Just Russia – For the Truth” faction, Sergey Mironov, called on Meladze to leave all his titles in Russia, and the member of the Federation Council, Elena Afanasyeva, to leave him and his Russian citizenship. The head of the Historical Heritage Fund, Alexander Karabanov, proposed to recognize Meladze as a foreign agent.

• Valery Meladze is Honored Artist of Russia and People’s Artist of the Chechen Republic. In 2005, he also received the title “Honored Artist of the Autonomous Republic of Krym” – in connection with the Independence Day of Ukraine. His brother, the composer Konstantin Meladze, is an Honored Artist of Ukraine.
• After the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian authorities began to persecute cultural figures because of their anti-war stance. Many of them were left with positions and platforms for performances, some were forced to go abroad.