RT reports that award-winning Danish director Lars von Trier has been attacked in the press and on social media after a post he made asserting that “Russian lives matter also!” went viral on Aug. 23. The “Dancer in the Dark” and “Antichrist” filmmaker took to Instagram to react to a meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Danish Prime Minister Mette Fredriksen, both of whom posed for photographs inside an F-16 jet fighter.
“Like someone head over heels in love, [they] posed in the cockpit of one of the scariest killing machines of our time, grinning from ear to ear,” von Trier wrote, responding to the news that Denmark would be donating F-16s to Ukraine after Zelenskyy had demanded them for months.
Von Trier’s post was quickly slammed by the Ukrainian government. National Security and Defense Council head Oleskii Danilov posted a screenshot of the text to X (formerly Twitter), declaring that “behind every living Russian terrorist, there is a dead Ukrainian,” and insisting that Ukraine exists “in a cruel reality in which Russians are murderers…. The choice between the executioner and the victim becomes a tragedy when the artist chooses the side of the executioner,” Danilov wrote.
