Russia asks Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters to speak at UN Security Council on Ukraine

Russia has asked controversial Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters to be a speaker at a U.N. Security Council session focused on the war in Ukraine, Moscow’s First Deputy Permanent Representative to the U.N. announced on Wednesday.

Waters has repeatedly taken contrarian positions on the war in Ukraine since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion last February. Last August, he accused U.S. President Joe Biden of “fuelling the war in the Ukraine,” calling him a “war criminal” in an explosive interview with U.S. broadcaster CNN. He also slammed NATO for “pushing right up to the Russian border.”

The British artist was asked to be “a speaker at the U.N. Security Council meeting on the prospects for a peaceful resolution of the Ukrainian crisis in the context of growing Western arms shipments to that country,” Dmitry Polyanskiy wrote on his Telegram channel.

The meeting will take place on Wednesday, February 8, at 4 p.m. CET. It is unclear whether Waters will actually speak. A U.N. spokesperson for the secretary-general was not immediately available for comment

Earlier this week, Polly Samson — the wife of one of Pink Floyd’s members, David Gilmour, and a lyricist on the band’s last two albums — called Waters a “Putin apologist,” saying he was “anti-Semitic to [his] rotten core.”

Waters, 78, is one of the founding members of Pink Floyd. He left the group in 1985.