Ukraine bars Russian singer from entry

UKRAINE: Ukraine has barred Russia’s contender in the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest from entering the country for three years, effectively banning her from the final in Kiev next month.

The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) said yesterday that Yulia Samoylova had been banned for breaking Ukrainian law.

‘‘The Security Service of Ukraine has banned the citizen of the Russian Federation Yulia Samoylova from entering the country for a period of three years,’’ said Olena Gitlianska, an SBU spokesman.

She did not say which laws Samoylova has broken, but the ban is believed to be related to the singer’s performance at a concert in Crimea in 2015.

Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and considers the peninsula its sovereign territory but Ukraine considers Crimea to be illegally occupied territory and reserves the right to impose a travel ban on anyone who visits it without obtaining appropriate permission from Kiev first.

Samoylova, 27, who uses a wheelchair, was selected as Russia’s entry for the Eurovision contest by Russia’s state-owned Channel 1 this month.

Ukrainian officials had earlier suggested that the singer, who has suffered spinal muscular atrophy since she was a teenager, would be allowed to perform if she did not publicly voice support for the annexation.

Eurovision 2017 will be held in Kiev between May 9 and 13. Ukraine won the right to stage the 62nd Eurovision song contest after its entrant won the 2016 competition.

The usually kitsch song contest took on major political overtones in 2016 when Jamala, the Ukrainian contestant, squared off against Russia’s Sergei Lazarev.

In the end Jamala, a Crimean Tatar, won with 531 points for 1944, a song about Stalin’s wartime deportation of the Tatars that many saw as a jab at Russia. - Telegraph Group