I went through U2's subway performance entire while it was available on YouTube. It is not available anymore because RaiTV. So you'll just have to take my word on it. There was a credibility gap between Bono's addressing the crowd and their existing reality (the event was attended by Ukrainian soldiers) that seemed palpable with the human discomfort produced by his oblivious incongruity to their national circumstance when he made his universalist humanitarian appeal. But it was also incongruous with Antytila's boots on the ground elicitation of support in ways that made U2's professed bleeding heart liberalism clearly divorced from reality. Meaning they couldn't avoid the political minefield Ukraine represents with their appearance. They remained oblivious while it cropped up right in front of them.
Let's begin by directing our attention to Bono and the Edge's recent live performance in Ukraine @16:30:
Here at the murder scene,
The beginning of a fiction
The facts will not come clean
While so many mothers cry (a Ukraine performance lyric change for "Sunday Bloody Sunday")
Is this 4-D chess irony?
-If Bono had the existential misfortune of saying "difference is dignity, as Rabbi Sachs says" (@22:00 - brave!), and "difference is decency" while being born Ukrainian, Bono is walking right up to a thin line, beyond which right wing militias might well have duct taped Bono to a street pole and whipped him, which for Ukrainians is not all that unusual. (Twitter defenders of this behaviour assert this is justifiable vigilante control of looting and theft. But it is also alleged for detections in accent of Russian speakers, Roma, and any allegation of being a Russian collaborator, which in this circumstance can be as neutral as being desirous of a peace settlement between Russia and Ukraine.
Where is Ukraine at when children state they can get shot by their own military for saying they support Russia? Even the Pope got attacked as a conspiracy theorist for asserting NATO was the belligerent who had provoked Putin (that's a matter of history), which means the Pope had to meet with the spouses of Azov battalion members holed up in Avozstal a week later in order to appear "balanced". -Given the Ukrainian police are known to have collaborated with the neo-Nazi group C14 to purge Roma in Kiev multiple times prior to the Russian invasion, what do you think is more likely? The same Ukrainian human rights organization, Kharkiv, says that no more than 3% of police torture cases reach the courts in Ukraine.
"And in Europe, our Europe,
We do not fear difference, we embrace it
It's in our difference we become one"
-At least Bono gave them the right message, right? Let's go behind this press-tacle.
Bono (26:27):
"Now, world leaders who turned out to be comedians, what a revelation to have it the other way around.
Your president leads the world in the cause of freedom right now.
The people of Ukraine are not just fighting for your own freedom, you are fighting for all of us who love freedom, and we say 'thank you' - we rewrote this song at the beginning of the war, and the lyric is
And if the comic takes the stage and no one laughs,
and if the crowd pulls a fearless face, for the photograph,
This is not a curtain call, this is the greatest act of all,
stand up for freedom
So we play this for President Zelensky and for the people, the citizens of this great country" - Bono
(29:50)
And if the dancer on the street
Wears a veil of tears
It's a dance no army can defeat
Love turns her fears
Into a kind of rage
That can't be kept inside a cage
You fight or you fly,
We're born or we die
For freedom
-Let's go, mate. (That wasn't in Ukraine's most recently revised lyrics.)
You'll notice the singing soldier from Antytila's first plea was for the extraction of Ukrainian soldiers beseiged and holed up in the Azovstal plant in Mariupol so they wouldn't be taken by Russia (Mariupol was where the Azov Batallion were headquartered)), and this is who they dedicated "Stand by Me" to? (37:40)
-And the whole show ended with "Slava Ukraini".
So Bono and the Edge ran PR performance cover for a public plea for the neo-Nazi battallion incorporated into the Ukrainain military's to be rescued to save them from being prosecuted for war crimes, which was the first stated intention of the Russian invasion in the first place. Azovstal is potentially more loaded than that, since holed up with them were possibly six other nation's military advisors (US, France, Canada, Sweden among them), who would potentially likewise be culpable as military advisors for operations in the Donbass post Maidan Coup 2014.
There is the open question of Canada's General Cadieu, who lost his bid to become head of Canada's armed forces due to a sexual assualt/harrasssment allegation within 24 hours of when he was about to take the post, and took off for Ukraine. It's possible he was arrested on May 1st (source, translation) before Azovstal's surrender. Like all fog of war pronouncements (at least we could take both sides with a grain of salt), we will have to wait and see if this ever hits the proverbial fan; -will there be a protracted procedural pantomine engaging the International Criminal Court, perhaps?
Azovstal surrendered less than two weeks later after U2's subway performance. The fog of war propaganda dressed the event in the usual manner.