Politics may again cloud Eurovision song contest
Host Ukraine threatens to jail Russian entrant
MOSCOW • The Eurovision Song Contest, the international music competition that introduced the world to ABBA’s mercilessly upbeat pop and the Italian paean to blue skies optimism, Volare, has become clouded by nationalistic feuds.
A particularly chauvinistic drumbeat is crescendoing around this year’s festival in Kyiv: Ukraine said Monday that it may bar Russia’s contestant from entering, on the grounds that she illegally toured Crimea after Moscow annexed the peninsula in 2014. Or, it may arrest her.
That this year’s instalment would be as politically charged as ever was clear the moment Ukraine’s contestant, Jamala, took home the prize in 2016, which gave Kyiv the right to host. That stung in Russia, especially because the winning entry, performed by an ethnic Crimean Tatar, veered from rules banning political lyrics by alluding to the mass deportation of her people by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, and hinted at mistreatment under Moscow’s current rule.
Some Russian lawmakers and glitterati have called for a boycott, but instead, Russia has announced that it will send 27-year-old Yulia Samoylova to perform, immediately stirring a new refrain of controversy in Russia and Ukraine.
Samoylova, who has used a wheelchair since childhood, will perform Flame is Burning, which has an upbeat message more in the spirit of Eurovision’s historical mission than 1944, Jamala’s 2016 winner.
But politics may prevent Samoylova from being in Kyiv when Eurovision kicks off in May. She performed in Crimea in 2015 and Ukrainian law gives authorities to the right to bar entry to the country for anyone who has been to the peninsula without crossing the de facto land border and going through Ukrainian border control and customs.
Visitors from Russia, who can fly from Moscow to Crimea, rarely go through the trouble.
Olena Gitlyanska, press secretary of Ukraine’s security service, said on her Facebook page that the agency will decide “based exclusively on the norms of Ukrainian legislation and interests of national security” whether Samoylova should be allowed in.
Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister and a legislator in the national parliament, suggested on Facebook that Samoylova be allowed to perform in the competition but also serve time for breaking the law.
“We are not denying the Russian contestant entry to Ukraine, but also will demonstrate in public from her example that we aren’t going to tolerate the violation of the Ukrainian border,” he said.
The Russian singer could face up to three years in prison “for breaching the order of entering the temporary occupied territories of Ukraine and leaving them for the purpose of infringing the interest of the state.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman shot back, telling reporters that it was “absolutely unacceptable” for Ukraine to politicize the contest.
Eurovision has seen political scores settled before. A year after it fought a brief war with Russia, Georgia pulled out of the 2009 competition in Moscow after organizers banned Georgia’s entry because it contained a reference to Putin.
And nothing happens in Russia without an accompanying conspiracy theory. Commentators in Moscow were quick to cast the choice of Samoylova — who was the runner-up in 2013 on Russia’s Factor A televised music contest and sang at the opening of the 2014 Paralympic Games in Sochi — as a cynical Kremlin ploy to generate sympathy.
“They are knowingly sending a young woman with a disability so that they can later report on the ‘inhumane Ukrainians’ who boo the Russian artist (if any of that happens),” television producer Sergey Kalvarskiy wrote on Facebook.
“For a country where people with disabilities unfortunately are treated as inferior, such a choice is unexpected,” wrote Vladimir Varfolomeyev, a reporter for Ekho Moskvy radio station. “It could be a sign of changes in the state policy toward people with disabilities but that’s hard to believe.
Most probably Moscow wants to avoid any possible problems for its representative in Kyiv (nobody will want to boo a disabled singer) or even hopes to win the contest by stirring up sympathy.”
It’s still rare, in fact, to see a person out in public in a wheelchair in Russia (or Ukraine). And then there was Josef Kobzon, a Russian crooner-turned-nationalist lawmaker, saying that Samoylova should not go to Kyiv because it would make the country look weak for people to see “Russia in a wheelchair.”