Pink Floyd founder cancels Poland concerts after Ukraine war remarks

Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters has cancelled concerts planned in Poland amid outrage over his stance on Russia's war against Ukraine, Polish media reported Saturday.

An official with the Tauron Arena in Krakow, where Waters was scheduled to perform two concerts in April, said they would no longer take place.

“Roger Waters’ manager decided to withdraw ... without giving any reason," Lukasz Pytko from Tauron Arena Krakow said on Saturday in comments carried by Polish media outlets.

The website for Waters' This Is Not a Drill concert tour no longer lists the Krakow concerts previously scheduled for 21 and 22 April.

City councillors in Krakow were expected to vote next week on a proposal to name Waters as a persona non grata, expressing “indignation” over the musician's stance on the war in Ukraine.

"Let him sing in Moscow," city councillor Lukasz Wantuch wrote on social media last week.

Waters wrote an open letter to Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska earlier this month in which he blamed “extreme nationalists” in Ukraine for having “set your country on the path to this disastrous war.” 

"Sadly, your old man (President Volodymyr Zelenskyy) agreed to those totalitarian, anti-democratic dismissals of the will of the Ukrainian people, and the forces of extreme nationalism that had lurked, malevolent, in the shadows have, since then, ruled Ukraine," Waters said.

Waters also criticised the West for supplying Ukraine with weapons, blaming Washington in particular, and has also criticised NATO, accusing it of provoking Russia.

Just one week before the Kremlin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February, Waters told the Russian state-funded outlet RT that warnings of the impending war were propaganda meant to demonise Russia.

Rus