Russian Warship and the Myth of Invincibility

I, Thorne Empire, want to talk to you about why I wrote “Russian Warship,” and why this song exists the way it does. It wasn’t born from a marketing plan or a trend. It came from watching a war unfold in real time and feeling that familiar, helpless burn in the chest; the one that says silence would be a kind of surrender.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the world saw tanks and missiles first, but what stayed with me was something quieter and far more dangerous to any empire: refusal. Very early in the invasion, a group of Ukrainian defenders on Snake Island were told to surrender by a Russian warship. The response; raw, human, unfiltered, was “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.” That was identity. One voice choosing dignity when fear would have been easier.

That moment mattered because it cut straight through the mythology of power. Empires depend on the illusion that they are inevitable, unstoppable, made of iron and destiny. But history keeps telling us the same story in different accents: steel sinks, lies rot, and fear doesn’t age well. The Russian cruiser Moskva, the very ship behind that radio call, later sank in the Black Sea. It became a grim, real world echo of a truth people often forget, machines don’t win wars, people do.

This war has never been about conquest from the Ukrainian side. It’s about home. Streets you have walked your whole life. Apartments with burn marks and memories on the walls. Language, music, family, stubborn continuity. That’s why the resistance hit so hard and spread so fast. Ukraine didn’t just fight with weapons; it fought with unity. Volunteers organized supply lines. Civilians learned first aid overnight. Musicians picked up rifles, and soldiers filmed TikToks that dismantled propaganda with humor sharper than bullets. It reminded the world that morale is a weapon no factory can mass produce.

“Russian Warship” lives in that space between anger and love. There’s rage in it; there has to be. Anger is what tells you something precious is under threat. But underneath that is something steadier: solidarity. When writing this song, I was thinking about how collective courage works. One voice answers first. Then another. Then suddenly thousands are speaking, and fear doesn’t know where to land.

Interesting thing about authoritarian power: it’s loud, fast, and brittle. It relies on spectacle and shock, but it struggles with patience. Freedom movements, on the other hand, survive on endurance. They don’t need to win every moment. They just need to outlast the lie. That’s why the song keeps circling back to truth, unity, and survival instead of dominance or revenge. Tyrants don’t fall because someone screams louder. They fall because people stop believing they are permanent.

I didn’t write this song to glorify war. I wrote it to honor resistance; especially the kind that comes from ordinary people refusing to disappear. Music has always been part of that tradition. Songs remember what propaganda tries to erase. They carry emotion across borders when politics fails.

When you listening to this song, you are not cheering destruction. You are standing with the idea that empires rot, and no amount of steel can crush a people who decide, together, not to kneel before evil.