By Can Öztaş
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A few weeks before NATO leaders gather in Ankara, Istanbul hosted a more strange kind of summit. It unfolded not in conference halls, but across ferry terminals, concert queues and crowded streets. There were chants, police, sleepless residents and tens of thousands of young people singing with a Belarusian artist who cannot perform freely in his own country or in Russia.
Max Korzh is not a protest singer in the old heroic register, guitar in hand, conscience polished for history. He is a mass youth figure from the Russian-speaking world. His songs speak of home, friendship, loss, youth, loyalty and escape. He holds an anti-war position, but his appeal is not doctrinal. It is emotional, contradictory and messy. In other words, human, which is always inconvenient for politics.
His Istanbul concert suggested that the war has not entirely managed to divide the people it seeks to separate, nor to sort them into the neat categories preferred by propagandists and television panels. Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians and others did not suddenly become one political community in a stadium. One should not pretend that grief, occupation, displacement and responsibility dissolve in a chorus. But for a few hours these divided young people inhabited a common soundscape that the war has not managed to destroy.
MANUFACTURED CHORUS
On the same day as the Istanbul concert, Donald Trump circulated an AI-generated fantasy of global adoration, a video in which the world appears to sing his name. The contrast is almost too neat, but still revealing.
In one scene, power imagines music as obedience. Trump’s synthetic anthem builds a closed chorus and reduces the world to background vocals for power. Look closely and the chorus is smaller than it pretends. What it calls the “world” is only a parade of crude national stereotypes. So, it is not the world singing his name. It is one partisan ventriloquising a cartoon of the world. The old authoritarian dream has always had a musical quality: one rhythm, one crowd, one name.
The Istanbul concert produced something less obedient and less tidy. It let contradiction remain audible. A divided crowd used music not to forget the war, but to inhabit a space the war has not fully consumed.
Anyone who takes music seriously knows that music is never wholly outside the material world it seems to transcend. It is an industry, a commodity, a technology of mood and, increasingly, an algorithmic instrument of political fantasy. It sells rebellion, packages grief, circulates belonging and turns memory into content. Protest songs and peace songs are no exception. They travel through ticket platforms, streaming services, phone clips and the hungry machinery of social media. Sincerity survives, but never untouched.
The political question, then, is what kind of togetherness the song briefly creates. Does it let people hear one another, or does it turn them into background vocals for someone else’s fantasy?
That is why we will not romanticise or dismiss the concert. Such moments do not abolish war or prove that peace is near. They do something smaller and more irritating to power. They reveal that the emotional map of conflict is never as clean as the strategic map pretends. Division remains incomplete.
WAR TO THE NORTH
This is where Istanbul becomes more than a concert venue. In the early months of the war, Turkey hosted serious attempts to bring Russia and Ukraine into diplomatic proximity. Those meetings did not solve the conflict. They showed that rooms for dialogue still existed. After all, diplomacy begins with the possibility of shared space.
The Ankara summit will take place in a few weeks. NATO is not neutral in this war, nor should it pretend to be. Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity are the legal and political basis on which any serious peace must stand. But the summit may still be a chance to send a message across the Black Sea. Support for Ukraine does not require the abandonment of diplomacy.
The Istanbul concert has reminded Ankara that the war to the north is not background noise. So, Ankara’s task is to preserve Turkey’s role as a venue. Imperfect, noisy and at times uncomfortable, yet still open. A stadium guarantees no reconciliation, neither does a summit. Both preserve the possibility of encounter; the one thing diplomacy cannot begin without. The young people who filled the streets this week were not waiting for permission to share a space. They simply did.
Ankara should listen before the summit begins.
