I’m gonna go out on a limb with a controversial opinion: War is bad.

Russia has launched what seems like a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, bombing cities across the country. It’s always risky to trust images and videos from social media in a crisis, but reputable news sources have shown the Ukrainian people driven to subway stations doubling as bomb shelters and explosions across major cities. It’s awful.

Now, I’m not an expert on international diplomacy, and I don’t exactly have any contacts in the Russian government, but what I do know is American history. From that lens, what Putin and Russia are doing is utter madness. After World War II, the people who built the weapons got very rich and decided they didn’t want to stop being rich, so they’ve used their lobbyists and connections to push the U.S. into a never-ending series of proxy wars and conflicts ever since.

Korea, Vietnam, Cold War tensions, Iraq,  Iraq again, Afghanistan—as soon as one ends, another always begins, because if we aren’t fighting somebody, the market for weapons goes away. And we recently got out of a 20-year occupation of Afghanistan. So, without knowing any specifics about what’s going on in any other nation, based on that alone I would be hesitant to volunteer to be the next profit driver for Lockheed Martin and General Atomics. There’s a reason we’ve gone nearly a century without a non-proxy war between Western nations: nobody wants to give the heavily armed country where war profiteers finance entire political campaigns an excuse.

But here we are anyway.

In the heat of the moment, from thousands of miles away, it’s easy to think of the situation in the abstract and forget that Ukrainians are people trying to live their lives, so in these moments I try to humanize the humans to keep perspective about the actual real-world toll this is taking. So, in addition to my favorite YouTube blacksmith Dmitry Shevchenko, I’ve been doing what I do and listening to Ukrainian bands. I can’t speak a word of the language and I can’t even attempt to pronounce words written in Cyrillic letters, so I take no responsibility for the lyrical content, but here are five of my favorites that I’ve found.

BoomBox – “Я Твой”

I love me some groove rock.

It’s a shame that aside from groove metal, the rock version has fallen out of favor even more than rock music in general. But it lives on in Kyiv, where BoomBox has been going for about 15 years now. I also found that they sacrificed a lot of money by refusing to play in Russia after the invasion of Crimea, and for that I salute them.

Yeah, a lot of these descriptions are gonna be a little thin. I know a lot about music but I just got into Ukrainian music this week, so this one is absolutely about the sound rather than the history. But you people don’t read what I have to say anyway.

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Griby – “Тает Лёд”

This one kinda blows my mind. That video has nearly 250 million views but the band behind it doesn’t have an English-language Wikipedia page. And it’s good! It’s got a chill sort of hip-hop vibe that I enjoy very much.

That said, the lack of English-language press makes it hard to know anything about them. I tried to run their Ukrainian Wikipedia page through Google Translate but it says things like this helpful paragraph: “Musical style by Griby is based on the hip-hop snow house. The group has always been in contact with people: they do not have interviews, but they do not take photos anonymously. In video clips, you can watch bandwidths or cappuccino makers.”

I don’t care what that was actually supposed to mean, if I ever start a band all videos of me will be of a cappuccino maker.

SKAI – “Wings”

This band attempted to represent Ukraine in “Eurovision” 2017, and as regular followers of my annual roast of “Eurovision” entries know, the two requirements to participate in that God-forsaken competition are 1) that the lyrics need to be in English for some reason and 2) it needs to be cinematic to the point of kinda dull.

SKAI does have the English thing down; a few of their songs are in English. And their songs are all pretty sweepingly cinematic. But I suspect the reason they didn’t actually win their nation’s competition to go to “Eurovision” proper is that they’re not dull. Look at all the fire in this video they won’t let me embed for some reason, that’s not how you win the Great European (And Australian For Some Reason) Bland-Off.

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Dymna Sumish — “Кращий друг самурая”

I take back what I said earlier: Groove rock is fine, but what I really like is groove punk.

How else would you classify this other than groove punk? I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anything like it but I love it. All music should be groove punk from now on. I didn’t realize that this is the genre I need in my life but here we are. I’m a groove punk person now.

Tin Sontsia — “Заколисав”

Look, you knew coming into this that you weren’t gonna get out of it without hearing some Ukrainian folk metal. I am on record as absolutely loving all genres of folk metal, I’m wearing a The HU T-shirt as I’m writing this, so you know the first thing I checked was whether Ukrainian folk metal was a thing. And it is.

The problem is, that video I embedded? Not a great example! But like SKAI and Dymna Sumish, most Tin Sontsia videos are blocked from embedding. So do me a favor and click this link, and also this link, to hear two of the songs I actually wanted to choose.

My point of all this is, Ukraine is a nation full of real people. Russia’s invasion is awful conceptually, and it’s awful because of what it implies, but it’s also awful because a nation of regular people are suffering right now because of it. Never forget that.

Follow editor Daniel J. Willis and tweet column ideas to him at Twitter.com/BayAreaData.