Verka Serduchka performs during the Big Eurovision Party in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, on 12 December 2024. Photo: EPA/RAMON VAN FLYMEN

A DJ has been charged with “discrediting the Russian army” for playing a song by Ukrainian pop star Verka Serduchka to a virtually empty club in a village near Sevastopol in occupied Crimea on Saturday morning, pro-Kremlin channel Crimean SMERSH has reported.

According to the channel, DJ Pavel Korotky put on Gulyanochka, a track by “transgender Russophobe” Verka Serduchka, which includes the lyric “Ukraine has not yet perished”, the first line of the Ukrainian national anthem.

Accusing Korotky of playing the track “without shame”, Crimean SMERSH noted that he had only changed the music after one of the few people present at the event warned him of the legal consequences playing the song could have under Russia’s strict wartime censorship laws.

Serduchka, the drag persona of Ukrainian performer Andriy Danylko, has been popular in Russia and Ukraine for decades and represented Ukraine in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2007. However, Danylko has not toured Russia since 2014, when Russia began its military intervention in Donbas and Crimea, and openly condemned Russia’s subsequent full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

On Saturday, Korotky was detained and taken to a police station, where a formal administrative protocol was drawn up against him for “discrediting” the Russian army. Korotky was later forced to record a video apology.

“I support Russia. I support the special military operation,” he said in the video, referring to the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, which was shared by Crimean SMERSH, which describes itself as a “register of Russophobes, Ukronazis and traitors to the Motherland”.

“I’m sorry for what happened. I just got distracted, didn’t look [at the track], played it, and once I heard what it was — I realised it was too late,” Korotky explained.

The club’s management told the Russian Telegram channel Ostorozhno Novosti that Korotky had been filling in for a colleague, and that they had cut all ties with him since the incident.