When Art Becomes Reality: The Absurdity of August

In August 2025, a piece of news that was bordering on the absurd went viral across Ukraine: Kremenchuk-based musician Kostyantyn Kuusk, a man with a disability who uses a wheelchair, was declared a wanted man by the local Territorial Recruitment Center (TCC). For many, this story was just another example of the chaos and soullessness of the mobilization machine.

But one detail turned this bureaucratic screw-up into a powerful social statement. Four months earlier, in April 2025, STÉNKON had released a track called "Meat Without Rights". In it, with documentary-like precision and cold fury, he described the exact processes he would later fall victim to. Art didn't just predict reality—it diagnosed the problem long before the symptoms hit the author himself.

The Wartime Trilogy: Art as a Social Audit

In late March and early April 2025, during a period of grueling battles and growing exhaustion on the home front, STÉNKON created a trilogy that served as an uncompromising audit of the wartime reality. Each track took aim at one of the key fronts Ukraine is fighting on.

1. The Foreign Enemy. Track: "Stop War": Here, the artist dissects the imperial, hateful nature of Russian aggression. He doesn't bother with shades of gray, calling the "Russian world" ideology by its real names—"a rocket in a school," "smoke over an apartment," "blood on an icon." It's a powerful indictment aimed outward, at the enemy that came to destroy everything Ukrainian.

2. The Internal System. Track: "Meat Without Rights": In this song, the criticism flips 180 degrees—inward. With brutal honesty, STÉNKON describes mobilization methods where a human being becomes a mere resource. In his lyrics, TCC employees are "jackals in the city," and the process is a conveyor belt that turns citizens with rights into silent "statistics" and "a skeleton in uniform." It's a scream against dehumanization, about how the state, in its hunt for numbers, loses respect for the individual.

3. The Social Divide. Track: "Bluff and Truth": The third track hits the rawest nerve—the chasm between the frontline reality and the carefree life back home. The artist slams the glossy, censored image of war created by the media, where you can't see that "people are getting seriously messed up out here." He points out the glaring social inequality: while some "cover the ruins with their bodies," others are "chilling in Paris." It's a song about the loss of unity and shared responsibility.

"Meat Without Rights": Anatomy of a System Failure

This was the track, written in April, that became prophetic. In it, STÉNKON isn't just angry—he's documenting. Lines about how "they dragged a blind man to the commission" don't sound like artistic exaggeration but like on-the-ground reporting. At the core of the narrative is the total indifference of the system, personified by faceless leaders: "The guys in the offices don't give a damn who dies."

When, four months later, the author himself, a man in a wheelchair, ended up on a wanted list, his lyrics stopped being just a song. They became a document, a testimony, a piece of evidence. Kostyantyn's personal story transformed him from an artist-critic into a living symbol of the conflict between a citizen and a state machine that, in his own words, "takes—but gives nothing back."

A Mirror to the State: Why the STÉNKON Case is More Than Just One Story

STÉNKON's story and his art are a massive red flag, signaling deep-seated risks for Ukraine. Victory in a war of attrition depends not only on weapons supplies and battlefield success but also on the strength of the social contract within the country. This contract is built on trust: citizens give the state the most valuable things they have—their lives and freedoms—in exchange for justice, protection, and respect.

Every story of unjust mobilization, of corruption in medical commissions, of bureaucratic indifference—is a direct hit to that contract. Such cases erode trust in state institutions far more effectively than enemy propaganda because they strike at the very heart of motivation: the belief that your sacrifice is not in vain and is for a just nation.

Art like STÉNKON's functions as a barometer, measuring the pressure in society. It articulates the fears, frustrations, and anger that many are afraid to voice. And here, his line sounds like a final warning: "Silent pain is the best tool of war." That pain can be turned not only against a foreign enemy but against one's own country if it stops listening to its citizens.

For the Ukrainian government, this is a clear signal: the problems at home demand just as much, if not more, attention than the external threat. Ignoring these signals, dismissing them as "isolated incidents," is a path to destroying the unity and trust that are Ukraine's greatest weapons in this war.