Lisa Roberts, who co-founded the band Hole with Courtney Love and Eric Erlandson in 1989, packed her bags and relocated to Ukraine at the outbreak of the country’s war with Russia.
Roberts’ move to Ukraine was revealed in a new interview with The Daily Beast, in which she recalls first being drawn to the Ukrainian cause via the country’s heavy metal community. Once she learned that friends of hers — and members of the Ukrainian metal scene — were in need of dire assistance, she moved to Donbas to serve as the logistics manager for the humanitarian NGO Road to Relief.
Before joining the front lines in Donbas, the California native had been working for a major company in logistics and felt her skills could be translated to the humanitarian aid efforts needed in Ukraine. She volunteered with NGO last year to provide aid to Donbas’ ransacked villages, and is now back in California with high hopes of the conflict deescalating. Furthermore, she’s studying paramedicine, and plans to go back to Ukraine later this year to finish her volunteer service.
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“For now I sit here in the US, depressed, around people who don’t give a fuck and don’t see the war with Russia as a problem to their lifestyle. They simply don’t care. They don’t want to talk about it and they really don’t give a fuck what I have to say about it,” Roberts told The Daily Beast. “If I get the opportunity to go back I don’t think I will ever return here. I don’t have any reason to.”
Elsewhere in her interview with The Daily Beast, Lisa Roberts also discussed her friendship with former bandmate Courtney Love, forming Hole and subsequently quitting the band (“I quit because I felt the quality was lacking”), and meeting Kurt Cobain, whom she described as “a very angry and troubled man.”