This Greater Boston musician is still raising funds for Ukraine, though attention has waned

Alexander Vavilov has spent the last 10 months raising almost $100,000 for musicians in Ukraine, many of whom were displaced during the Russian invasion.

But on a recent afternoon, he was in his Lynn apartment with his viola, practicing a piece called "Monologue" by a contemporary Ukrainian composer named Yevhen Stankovych for a benefit concert.

As the end of 2022 nears, GBH News' Morning Edition co-host Jeremy Siegel, who interviewed Vavilov in May, checked in with him again as part of a year-end update.

“I think many, perhaps, feel like they have already done their due and might not be as responsive to our proposals to hold a fundraiser as they might have been in the spring,” Vavilov said. “So all of this makes for a pretty tough landscape. And to tell the truth, it's just very difficult to raise further funding.”

Vavilov runs the Relief Fund for Ukrainian Musicians, which is established at the Lisa Batiashvili Foundation and has helped nearly 200 musicians during the war.

“There were many groups here in the Boston area and elsewhere in the United States that generously held fundraising events, that helped raise awareness and money,” he said. “One can always wish for more awareness and more support. There are still a lot of organizations we didn't manage to reach.”

It's been a difficult time for music organizations in general, Vavilov said, with COVID and global economic uncertainty cutting into funding.

Ten months since the invasion, the need in Ukraine is still pressing. But the international attention has somewhat waned, making fundraising harder, despite the continuing human toll.

One musician Vavilov has been in contact with is a woman near the city of Mariupol, in a building that had been shelled multiple times.

“A shell hit their building more than once, and one of them killed her husband. The other one caused her father's legs to be amputated, which was done without anesthesia or antibiotics,” Vavilov said. “And they lived in the burning apartment building for many days. When I asked her why did they not run away to a nearby building which wasn't burning, she said that many of her neighbors did and they shouldn't have because that building then collapsed and buried everyone, hundreds of people.”

The woman and her daughter have dealt with hunger, shelling and interrogations by Russian soldiers.

“It took a while to get out of the mindset where [the daughter] would tell her mom that her wish is to die in a way that is not painful, that she does not want to burn to death, she wants to die from a bullet or a shell landing that is quick and painless,” Vavilov said. “You know, the things she described, it's one thing when you see this in the news of the things that you read in an article. But when you hear it from a person who's experienced that, it's just — it's a very profound experience.”

Keeping music and art alive during war is difficult work. But the people of Ukraine are doing it, he said.

He recalled video he had seen on social media of a concert in Kiev Philharmonic, a hall he attended almost weekly as a teenager. The power was out, but musicians were playing in the dark, illuminated by the glow of phone flashlights.

“They kept playing. They kept on with a performance that was scheduled for that night,” he said. “It's hard to describe how determined people are, that this is just not going to break down.”