U2 closed out the final night of their Las Vegas Sphere residency by playing the War deep cut “40” for the first time since 2016. The 1983 tune closed out countless U2 shows throughout the Eighties, and it happened to be U2’s 40th show at the Sphere since they opened up the $2 billion venue in September 2023.
U2 has been performing Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over” in concert at the band’s Sphere residency recently, and before Saturday night’s show, the introduction to that song extended far longer than usual, as Bono paid tribute to the dream of Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident who died in prison days earlier.
The singer spoke up for the freedom of the Ukrainian people and against Russian leader Vladimir Putin — who many believe is directly responsible for the political prisoner’s still-unexplained death — before leading the crowd in a chant of Navalny’s name.
“Next week it’ll be two years since Putin invaded and tried to destroy the hard-won freedoms” of the Ukrainian people, Bono said. “Next it’ll be Poland, next it’ll be Lithuania, East Germany; who knows where this man will or won’t go. To these people freedom is not just a word in a song. For these people freedom is the most important word in the world — so important that Ukrainians are fighting and dying for it. And it’s so important that Alexei Navalny chose to give his up,” the singer continued, referring to the dissident’s voluntary choice to return to Russia in 2021, where he was immediately arrested upon arrival and sentenced to the remote Arctic penal colony where he died.
