Official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova joked that musician Jared Leto, after the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry was dissatisfied with him, found himself in good company - between the outstanding classical poet Alexander Pushkin and Empress Catherine II.
“It seems to me that the figure you mentioned is generally lucky, he is in good company, somewhere, it seems to me, between Pushkin and Catherine II,” Zakharova said in response to a request to comment on Kyiv’s claims against musician Jared Leto.
She emphasized that such claims that the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry made against Leto are “ridiculous” to hear from those who proclaimed Nazi collaborators as national heroes and from those who violate international legal obligations, abolish the Russian language and persecute for religious views, as well as destroy monuments to their own heroes.
Earlier, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry expressed dissatisfaction with the desire of the American singer and lead singer of the band Thirty Seconds to Mars Jared Leto to perform in Russia and called it an alleged insult to the Ukrainian military. Leto earlier said at a concert in Belgrade that “one day, when all these problems are over,” the musicians will visit Russia. He also indicated that he would return to Belgrade and visit Kyiv.
In November 2023, the Odessa City Council decided to demolish the monument to Catherine the Second. The dismantling of monuments associated with Soviet history, as well as the renaming of streets, began in Ukraine in 2015, when the decommunization law was passed. Recently, the Ukrainian authorities have begun to fight not only against Soviet history, but also against everything connected with Russia.
