In 2024 a man who had played drums on two Drudkh albums was killed in the fighting in eastern Ukraine. Mykola Sostin, who recorded under the name Amorth, was in the band between 2004 and 2006. That is the plainest available statement of what has happened to these two scenes, which for twenty years shared a distribution network, a set of labels, a language of publication and in several cases the same players, and which now do not speak to each other at all.
The chapter covering black metal outside Scandinavia introduces the Ukrainian and Russian bands as the last European scenes to arrive. This page takes them separately, because since February 2022 they are separate in every practical sense: different labels, different borders, different audiences and, for the Ukrainian musicians, a conscription law that decides whether a tour happens.
Ukraine: poetry, and nothing else said aloud
Drudkh has been working out of Kharkiv since 2002 and has released roughly one album every eighteen months for over twenty years, from Forgotten Legends in 2003 through to Shadow Play in 2025, without giving interviews and without printing the lyrics to several of them. Those lyrics come from nineteenth and twentieth century Ukrainian poets, Taras Shevchenko, Oleksandr Oles and Oleh Olzhych among them, which is a genuinely unusual choice: a metal band building its text out of a national literary canon rather than out of mythology or its own writing. Roman Saenko also runs Hate Forest and Blood of Kingu, and the three catalogues together account for most of what the country is known for abroad.
What the records do is simple to describe and difficult to imitate. A single melodic line is stated over a rolling blast, held far past the point where a Norwegian band would change figure, and allowed to decay rather than to resolve, with the production kept warm and the guitars folded into one another instead of separated. The result reads as scenery rather than as attack, which is why the band is so often described in terms of weather and so rarely in terms of aggression.
The publishing history is worth setting out because it shows how little of this was ever built at home. The first Drudkh albums went out through Supernal Music, an English label, and the band moved to Season of Mist, a French one, in 2008, where it has stayed. Almost every Ukrainian record with an international profile has followed the same route: written and recorded domestically, manufactured and sold from western Europe. A scene whose whole subject matter is its own country has been dependent for twenty years on foreign companies to put that subject matter into shops, and the arrangement worked well enough that nobody thought about it until the borders closed.
Odesa, a saxophone, and a closed border
White Ward is the other Ukrainian band with an international audience and it arrived from a completely different direction. Formed in Odesa in 2012 by the guitarist Yurii Kazaryan, it added the saxophonist Dima Dudko in 2019 and has used dark jazz textures inside post black metal ever since: Futility Report in 2017, Love Exchange Failure in 2019 and False Light in 2022, the last of them written and released after the full scale invasion had begun.
Then the practical reality took over. The band's European tour in 2023 was cancelled because the Ukrainian state declined to grant the members permission to leave the country during wartime, men of military age being barred from crossing the border without it. No label dispute, no illness, no visa refusal by a Western consulate. A country at war simply kept its citizens, and a black metal band that had spent a decade building an audience abroad lost the year in which it could have consolidated it.
A country at war kept its citizens, and the tour was cancelled. That is the whole story of Ukrainian black metal since 2022.
Russia: a scene with no shopfront
Russian black metal is almost entirely made by one or two people at a time, released by foreign labels, and sold to an audience that is somewhere else. Sivyj Yar has been the project of a single musician working from a village outside Saint Petersburg since 2006, and its records have gone out through the Italian label Avantgarde Music. Grima has been a Siberian duo since 2014 and spent most of its existence as a studio operation with no live activity at all. Ultar began in 2011 under a different name and restarted in 2016 as an atmospheric post black metal band. Second to Sun and Trna work the same territory from opposite ends of it.
That absence of a stage has shaped the music itself. Russian black metal of the last fifteen years is overwhelmingly atmospheric: long reverberant pieces, folk melody carried on clean guitar or keyboard, vocals mixed low and treated as another instrument, arrangements that make no concessions at all to how they would work in front of two hundred people in a hall. It is music built for headphones by musicians who never expected to play it live, and whatever else is true of it, that is a coherent position rather than a compromise.
What none of them have is a domestic industry. Where Poland built labels that outlived three generations of bands and Greece at least had one that went bankrupt, Russia has produced essentially no black metal label of international standing in thirty years, which is why the catalogue lives on Bandcamp and on the rosters of Italian, German and Ukrainian companies. That was an inconvenience before 2022. Since then, with payment routes cut and European bookings gone, it has become the whole problem.
The part that has to be recorded
Both countries have a documented national socialist wing and it is larger here than anywhere else in this chapter. The Russian circle that assembled around a rehearsal room and a tape label in the late nineties was explicit about its politics on its own sleeves, and several projects working under those politics are still active. Nokturnal Mortum, from the same city as Drudkh, spent its early years attached to the same material and has since published statements distancing itself from it, which is on the record alongside the earlier position. Naming the fact is the whole of the treatment: no record here is assessed, none is recommended, and the subject has an article of its own elsewhere on this site. The point worth making instead is that the great majority of the musicians in this article have nothing to do with any of it and have spent thirty years being asked about it anyway.
What the war did to the map
Before 2022 these two scenes were treated as one by nearly everybody outside them, sharing distributors, festival bills and in some cases members. That arrangement has ended, and the mechanics of the ending are worth stating precisely rather than emotively: Ukrainian musicians of military age cannot leave without permission, so Ukrainian bands mostly cannot tour; Russian bands have lost European bookings, Western payment processing and most of their access to the audience that paid for the records; and the labels in between have picked one side or withdrawn. Whatever anybody thinks about any of that, the practical result is that two of the most productive scenes in European black metal have been removed from the touring circuit at the same time.
The countries directly to the west, which spent the same three decades building small, stubborn and largely self financed scenes without any of this attached to them, are covered in czech, Slovak and Hungarian Black Metal.
