This song came out in 1985, I was a child then. I lived the tail end of the Cold War and for all my adult life it seemed like a historical event you read in the books, it didn’t feel like it affected me. In 1986 I lived the Chernobyl disaster: I remember being told we shouldn’t drink milk or eat too much vegetables. Again, it always felt like something distant that happened but didn’t really stuck with me.

So now Russia invades Ukraine and I think I have Sting’s Russians done and it might be a good idea to release it so people who didn’t live that era might have an idea of what was even conceivable at the time. And so I start doing some reviewing in Reaper and I got through bass, guitar and keys with some struggle and when I got to vocals… I kinda lost it. “Mister Krushchev said, We will bury you” just very surprisingly triggered something I didn’t think was there: it all came back to me how for years, even as a child, I actually was internalizing something unthinkable. A global conflict was possible and we lived under its threat for the longest time. The stress, the fear, the bleakness all came back to me in a wave… I have never been this emotional working on a song.

Anyway, the song is certainly not Rock Band-friendly but I think it needed to be in the game for its value. And I don’t know if anyone who didn’t live that era understands how the line “I hope the Russians love their children too” was not an exaggeration but a true belief a lot of us had, even in our childhood.

My heart goes out to the Ukrainian people: nobody deserves this, I hope you will have justice and that death will soon end. I really thought we were over all of this…