Banned in Russia after anthem for stray animals goes viral

Russia’s internet censor has asked streaming services to restrict access to an artist called Ap$ent after one of his songs went viral across Eastern Europe.

TikTok users from countries like Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan have in recent months adopted his 2022 song Can I come with you? as a backing track for clips of stray animal rescues.

The censor, Roskomnadzor, imposed the ban on his music, supposedly to prevent “destabilisation of Russian society”.

Ap$ent, who comes from Belarus and his real name is Arseniy Kisliak, thinks he’s probably been targeted because of an earlier song he wrote with an anti-war theme.

But it was Can I come with you? that attracted millions of listens on YouTube and Spotify because of the TikTok trend.

The song was never meant to be about stray animals. Ap$ent wrote it when he was fleeing Belarus with his wife Maryia.

They decided to leave after she was sentenced to a year in an open penal facility for insulting Belarus’s long-time leader Alexander Lukashenko. She had used a derogatory word on social media and Belarusian authorities assumed it was aimed at him.

Although the song was about the couple’s experience of leaving, Ap$ent says that animals did partly inspire the lyrics.

“The line ‘Can I come with you?’ was probably inspired by my cat, Tishka. He somehow knew we were leaving soon,” Ap$ent said. “And one day he came to me and gave me a cuddle, which wasn’t his usual behaviour.”

He believes the Russian authorities received complaints from internet users: “I was accused of calling all Russians fascists. That’s untrue. I’d never generalise like that,” he told BBC Russian.

But Ap$ent thinks the ban made him even more famous. “People who don’t trust [the Russian internet censor]… became interested. They thought that I must be a decent person, if Roskomnadzor blocked me”.

Ap$ent first rose to fame during the Covid pandemic, with a tongue-in-cheek song about Mr Lukashenko’s advice to Belarusians to drink vodka and visit saunas to keep Covid-19 at bay.

The singer’s other satirical hit, The song of a jolly Belarusian, came out ahead of Belarus’s presidential elections in 2020, which were widely condemned as rigged.

“Uncle Sasha [referring to Mr Lukashenko], no offence, but no-one is glad to see you… Go back to hell!,” sang Ap$ent, two months before the vote.

After the election, opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya claimed victory but fled Belarus as Mr Lukashenko brutally clamped down on protests.

Ap$ent and his wife Maryia have since fled too and are now living in Poland.

He says they now joke about Maryia’s comment on social media which prompted them to leave.

Despite his recent viral success, Ap$ent does not see himself as a political songwriter: “I’m purely writing from a position of common folk, and I add a bit of satire.”

His cat Tishka is still in Belarus but the singer hopes to bring him to Poland, and he plans open an animal rescue charity.