The former Pink Floyd leader Roger Waters is a longtime critic of Israel, and he’s also been a vocal critic of Joe Biden in recent months, including Biden in a “war criminal” montage during his This Is Not A Drill tour. In interviews, Waters has blamed NATO aggression for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and he’s written an open letter to the first lady of Ukraine, encouraging her husband, President Volodymyr Zelensky, to sue for peace. In a Rolling Stone interview a few months ago, Waters claimed that he’s on “a kill list that is supported by the Ukrainian government.” Right now, some of Waters’ old collaborators are taking aim at him.

Last week, as Rolling Stone points out, Roger Waters did an interview with the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung, and he posted a translation on his website. In that interview, Waters commented on the fact that Pink Floyd had teamed up with the Ukrainian musician Andrij Chlywnjuk to release the protest song “Hey Hey Rise Up!!“:

I have seen the video, and I am not surprised, but I find it really, really sad. It’s so alien to me, this action is so lacking in humanity. It encourages the continuation of the war. Pink Floyd is a name I used to be associated with. That was a huge time in my life, a very big deal. To associate that name now with something like this… proxy war makes me sad. I mean, they haven’t made the point of demanding, “Stop the war, stop the slaughter, bring our leaders together to talk!” It’s just this content-less waving of the blue and yellow flag. I wrote in one of my letters to the Ukrainian teenager Alina: I will not raise a flag in this conflict, not a Ukrainian flag, not a Russian flag, not a US flag.

Yesterday, in apparent response, the writer Polly Samson tweeted this about Roger Waters: “Sadly @rogerwaters you are antisemitic to your rotten core. Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching,misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac. Enough of your nonsense.” Samson is married to Waters’ ex-bandmate David Gilmour, and she wrote lyrics for some of Pink Floyd’s songs after Waters left the band in 1985. Gilmour quote-tweeted Samson and wrote, “Every word demonstrably true.”

David Gilmour has also been liking a number of tweets that criticize Roger Waters; you can see all of his likes here. In response, Waters posted this statement on Twitter: “Roger Waters is aware of the incendiary and wildly inaccurate comments made about him on Twitter by Polly Samson which he refutes entirely. He is currently taking advice as to his position.”

Waters and Gilmour have been in conflict for a long time, though most of it hasn’t been for political reasons. Instead, they’ve been arguing over who gets credit for what. A 2021 reissue of Pink Floyd’s Animals was reportedly held up because Gilmour vetoed an essay from the writer Mark Blake in the liner notes. In a statement on his website, Waters accused Gilmour of inflating his role in Pink Floyd at the time, writing that Gilmour “was, and is, a jolly good guitarist and singer. But, he has for the last 35 years told a lot of whopping porky pies about who did what in Pink Floyd when I was still in charge.”