https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/08/roger-waters-pink-floyd-un-security-council-ukraine-russia

Waters also ranted to any journo who would listen :

Telegraph:

Extracts from the latest rants of Roger Waters.

Telegraph

By

Tristram Fane Saunders

8 February 2023 •

It has not been a quiet week for Roger Waters. “You are anti-Semitic to your rotten core,” novelist Polly Samson told the rock star on Twitter. “Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac.”

“Every word demonstrably true,” chipped in her husband David Gilmour, the 76-year-old Pink Floyd singer and guitarist. Naturally, his ex-bandmate Waters, 79, rejected the “incendiary and wildly inaccurate” portrayal.

The latest spat follows an interview Waters gave to German newspaper Berliner Zeitung in which, not for the first time, he compared the state of Israel to Nazi Germany. After accusing Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid”, he went on to call the USA “the main aggressor” in the Russia-Ukraine war, a stance that seems to have gone down well in Russia, who invited him to speak at a UN Security Council hearing on Ukraine on Wednesday. He called the invasion “illegal” but “not unprovoked”.

Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, he went much further. The idea that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” is, in Waters’s view, “f—–g insane”. “Nazis,” he tells me, echoing Russian propaganda, are “in control of the government” in the war-torn country.

Over four impassioned hours, Waters gives vent to the full range of his often divisive, sometimes contradictory opinions, while his interviewer struggles to get a word in edgeways. Waters has strong views on – in no particular order – China, Spotify, Ecuador, Biden, Haiti, Brexit, Putin and, inevitably, Israel (of which more later).

I stick to whatever it is that I believe, and my side of any argument, in spite of the evidence.”

Well, can he give an example of a time he’s changed his mind due to the evidence?

“Yes, an article I wrote about three months ago calling Vladimir Putin a gangster… That may have been unfair.” He explains that he’s become a keen listener to The Duran, a podcast spin-off from a website that has published blogs linked to the anti-Nato hacking group Ghostwriter, and uses the Russian Empire’s two-headed eagle as a logo. After hearing their take on Russia, Waters now has more respect for Putin. “It may be that he’s leading his country to the benefit of all of the people of Russia.”

All of the people of Russia? Almost 200,000 of them who were sent to fight in Ukraine have died in the past year. Wouldn’t it be more to those people’s benefit if they were alive? “You can’t really have this conversation at all until you go back to 2004, and until you read everything that [Nato-critical US political scientist John] Mearsheimer has written…” Waters begins to give me a history lesson.

“The Ukraine” – he’s punctilious about that “The” – “is a deeply divided country. In fact, it’s not really a country at all, it’s only been there since Khrushchev, 1956. So it’s a patchy sort of vague experiment.” How long does a country have to exist, for him to accept it as a country? “I’m very happy with Barbados [independent since 1966].”

The interviewer concluded the article thus: “after four hours in Waters’s allegorical bar, I leave in serious need of a drink.”