In a Facebook posting this week, Lisitsa describes herself as someone who initially supported last year's revolution in Kyiv, saying she hoped the so-called Maidan movement would rid Ukraine of its corrupt, oligarchic ruling class.

But, she writes, she soon became disillusioned when the same oligarchs commandeered the revolution and, in her words, started to turn Ukrainians against one another.

Her critics, of which there are many, say she never supported an independent Ukraine and has always been a Russian stooge.

Neither side has been exactly polite.

Lisitsa is a dab hand at social media. It has been the secret to her success. As she told the London Telegraph three years ago, without YouTube, she would have laboured in obscurity as "just another blond, female, Russian pianist."

But as the civil strife in Ukraine heated up, she took to Twitter for other purposes. In her words, she was providing the balance that the mainstream media failed to give.

To supporters of the Ukrainian central government, however, she was an abomination.

The Ukrainian Weekly, for instance, pointed to a tweet in which she juxtaposed a photo of Ukrainian nationalists garbed in traditional, embroidered shirts with another of "spear-carrying, half-naked African villagers."

Her aim, the periodical said, was "to make Ukrainian patriotic feeling seem like barbarism and also, with the same brush, to smear Africans."

The Ukrainian Weekly was also outraged when, in another tweet, she referred to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko as "cluster-bomber in chief." And the publication was beside itself when she reprinted a cartoon depicting the Western media's coverage of Ukraine as a daisy chain of individuals with their heads up one another's rectums.

Critics also objected to a tweet regarding a battle in Eastern Ukraine in which she wrote "Kyiv kills scores of civilians." And they attacked her for observing that some who support Ukraine's central government are neo-Nazis.

In retaliation, supporters of the Ukrainian government picketed her appearance last fall at Pittsburgh's Heinz Hall. They carried signs suggesting she was a Nazi and calling her racist.

The Euromaidan Press wrote that she supports "Russian terrorism."

To supporters of Ukraine's central government, the Toronto Symphony decision is a great victory. "Valentina Lisitsa concerts cancelled for racism and hate speech," crowed the Euromaidan Press Tuesday.

Buoyed by this success, the Ukrainian Weekly now has its sights set on two other Western concert performers deemed overly sympathetic to Russia. The ground war in Ukraine sputters on. The ideological purges here are just beginning.

Thomas Walkom is a news services columnist.