Exclusive: How UDO extracted their guitarist from war-torn Ukraine

By STEVE MASCORD

UDO drummer Sven Dirkschneider has revealed how the German band feared for the life of guitarist Andre Smirnov before extracting him from war-torn Ukraine.

Smirnov and his band-mates are now on the promotional trail for a new record but the picture was very different a year ago following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“Andre, he’s from Russia but living in Ukraine with his wife and his family in Chernihiv,” Dirkschneider, 29, told Hot Metal.

“So it’s basically the triangle where they came in.

“When we first found out about this whole thing going on, we tried to contact him – of course. He wasn’t responding.

“There was sort of a few days or weeks even when we didn’t know. Is he alive?”

The siege of Chernihiv began on February 24, 2o22 and lasted until April 4, when Ukraine authorities said the Russian army had left the area.

Dirkschneider continues: “Then basically we got some reply that they’re basically sitting in their basement and trying to survive.

“I think it was going for a month where every day when we received a message from him, everyone was on the phone the whole day, like ‘did you hear anything from him?’

“As soon as we heard something it was ‘OK, good, he’s still alive’

“And then it came that time where he said, of course, they need to get out because it’s getting worse and worse and worse.

“But there was not that time slot, that time frame where they were able to leave because everything was fucked up.

“There were troops everywhere, the roads are fucked up, everything is destroyed.

“So luckily one day he wrote me that they are able to get … a minivan and then they drove towards the Polish border.

“Our producer Mattes (Pfeiffer) and I, he wrote us that they are going to be there the other day, we just went into the car and we went to Poland and picked him up with his family.”

UDO’s new album Touchdown is due on August 25. See the full interview with Sven, son of band principal and metal icon Udo Dirkschneider, below.

Full feature to come