Artist Defends 'Offensive' Mural of Ukrainian and Russian Troops Hugging

An artist whose street mural of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers hugging was condemned as offensive has defended his work as promoting a message of peace.

Peter Seaton painted the image on a building in Melbourne, Australia, in August, but over the last week, he faced objections from the country's Ukrainian community about the message it portrayed about Russia's invasion.

The artwork titled Peace Before Pieces was released digitally as an NFT, or non-fungible token, and made available on his Instagram page as an animation in which a mushroom cloud appears over the soldiers.

"The artwork is saying if we don't find peace, whether it's this war or another war, we're going to eventually blow each other up," he told Newsweek from Melbourne.

The Ukrainian ambassador to Australia, Vasyl Myroshnychenko, had described the work as "utterly offensive to all Ukrainians" while the Australian Federation of Ukrainian Organizations [AFUO] among other critics, said it drew a false moral equivalence between the aggressor and the victim.

AFUO co-chair Stefan Romaniw compared the image to that of "a rapist and a victim hugging."

Seaton, 29, who also goes by the moniker CTO, painted over the mural on Monday and apologized for the distress he had caused. "Obviously there's a lot of hurt people and I had no intention of doing that," he told Newsweek.

He said he had already created the image when he had been approached by the Ukrainian community to produce a work about the war, soon after Vladimir Putin's February 24 invasion.

He said that initially received some positive feedback, although when presented to the Ukrainian community, many expressed misgivings about its potential to cause offense.

"I sat on the idea for six months, and I asked dozens of people what they felt the mural represented and the overwhelming feedback was it was about peace between two nations."

"I thought about so many different ways that I could do another one, and it just wasn't coming to me. There's nothing that I can do that resonates with me on a deeper level more than this particular concept."

"I went ahead and did it because I just feel a message of peace is so important in a time of war. That's all my intention was—to create a message of peace, to de-escalate a conflict that could jeopardize the whole planet."

He rejected the charge that it was comparable to a rapist hugging their victim. "Soldiers are human. Some Russian soldiers don't want to be there. So to say all Russian soldiers are rapists is racist."

"It was art. It's not a diagram. It's metaphoric, and it's about love," he said, "It's two opposing forces of soldiers at war, that are literally blowing each other up."

"If you're fighting a country that has more nuclear weapons than any other country, and you're hoping to win, that puts everyone on the planet in jeopardy. Then I have a right to speak."

"They're [Ukrainians] defending their land, they need to defend their land...having defense against aggression is absolutely important," he said, "that's not what I'm saying with the artwork."

"If innocent civilians are dying daily, politicians are failing, not my art," he added.

He has sold six of the pieces, while another six are still available. The proceeds would go to United24, an initiative by President Volodymyr Zelensky to help rebuild Ukraine, and the charity World Beyond War.

While he understood the work "may have fallen short" of what he intended and that people objected to it, he said "maybe there is a bigger point around censorship and art. What kind of world do we live in when art is censored?"

Seaton, who is 29, was born in Surrey, England, before moving to Auckland, New Zealand, when he was 6. At 18, he moved to Australia where he has been based ever since.

Many took exception to Seaton's theme of the work that a negotiated settlement was key to ending the war.

In a widely shared Twitter thread, Olga Boichak, a lecturer in digital cultures at the University of Sydney, said that the work "implies that peace can be achieved if both parties agreed to lay down their weapons."

"By now, we all have a clear idea of what would happen if Ukraine stopped fighting, so this 'art' delegitimizes the lived experiences of resistance," she added.

Romaniw told Newsweek that in addition to his apology, Seaton "should undertake cross-cultural training to assist him in understanding the hurt he has caused so he does not repeat the same mistake."

Foreign Artists' Depiction of War in Ukraine

Michael Skop is a Ukrainian artist who has produced a number of works depicting the horror of the Russian invasion, which he posts on his Instagram page for his more than 15,000 followers.

He criticized Seaton's piece as showing that a "terrible situation has a simple solution" but he believed that non-Ukrainian artists should be encouraged to depict the war.

"Many foreigners paint pictures of the war in Ukraine, and I am glad that most of them are making great art," he told Newsweek from Kyiv, "but many of them are too far away geographically so they can't understand how terrible the reality is."

He said the danger for foreign artists was that they might oversimplify the war as a "quarrel" between nations and that it only needed negotiations for "peace to reign."

"It's very easy for foreigners to talk about peace and forgiveness if you are a bystander and not a victim," he said.

Skop has a work about the war that is available on The Revival Project, a digital initiative by the agency Depositphotos, which aims to raise funds to help restore cultural sites destroyed by the war.

Skop's own view of the war has been changed since the start of the invasion, when he was more open to compromises with Moscow that might end the fighting. With reports emerging of Russian atrocities, this view has changed, and he urges foreign artists to keep abreast of the war if they want to express something meaningful and accurate.

"I hope that these artists will read more and see more videos and photos to understand what exactly happened in Ukraine," he said. "They need to understand the war more deeply."