SEATTLE — When the shelling started in Kharkiv, Danny Degtjar might have been on the other side the world. But for the Seattle rapper better known as 28AV, the videos that surfaced of residential buildings destroyed by Russian forces hit incredibly close to home.
Those missile-ravaged apartment blocks looked just like the one where four generations of his father’s family made their home, up until eight years ago when Russian-backed separatists seized Kharkiv’s neighboring regions in eastern Ukraine. At the time, 28AV’s sister and her family left the Kharkiv apartment where their father was raised — a place AV had visited numerous times while growing up in Seattle.
The son of a Ukrainian father and Russian mother, 28AV arrived in Seattle as an infant after his parents fled Estonia when the Soviet Union collapsed. The veteran Central District rapper has spent his career articulating his emotions and life experiences in his music, often referencing his Russian-Ukrainian heritage. But days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, he struggled to find the words to describe how it felt watching his families’ home countries take up arms against each other.
