“Respond to missiles with laughter”: the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo honors Wednesday, May 25, Ukrainian cartoonists who “continue to do their work” despite the Russian invasion, publishing “out of solidarity” about twenty of their cartoons . Among them, a Russian bear which dips its paw in a hive before being devoured by bees, soldiers who slide a shell down a slide in a kindergarten, or instruments of torture bearing the image of Putin …
Signed Yuriy Zhuravel, Oleg Gutsol or Oleksiy Kustovsky, alias Kusto, these drawings, “obviously ruthless with the Russians, show a humor that does not want to surrender in the face of arbitrariness and terror”, explains Charlie Hebdo in a statement. Almost all of them are taken from an exhibition organized in Odessa by the local cartoonists’ association. The event is titled Russian warship, fuck you, in reference to this replica, which has become cult in Ukraine, launched at the beginning of the conflict by Ukrainian border guards from Serpents’ Island to the cruiser Moskva who ordered them to to surrender.
About forty cartoonists – mostly Ukrainians or from around twenty countries including Russia – took part via a call for drawings on Facebook. The funds raised by the sale of originals are donated “to the Ukrainian armed forces and the territorial defense of Odessa”, specifies Charlie Hebdo in an article on “humor” as a “weapon of mass resistance”. The weekly will “remunerate the association of cartoonists of Odessa” for the drawings retained, explained to AFP the journalist Antonio Fischetti, back from Ukraine.
If the “benevolent humor” of Ukrainians has turned into “wicked satire” since the Russian invasion in February 2022, it has its “limits”. Antonio Fischetti thus reports having had to give up his investigation into the stand-up in kyiv because of a drawing by Riss, published in Charlie Hebdo after the bombing of the Mariupol maternity hospital in March. “We saw women with spread legs, who take shells in the vagina, with the caption: “This time, the Russians push the cork too far”. It was obviously to denounce the indifference of Westerners. But that was perceived as an attack by my interlocutors,” writes the journalist. In the world of caricature, on the other hand, “some grimaced a little”, but “they did not send me for a walk”, he assures AFP.
