Not everyone is smiling after Ukraine took out this year’s Eurovision songwriting contest.
In fact, Russia is kicking up a right stink about it.
Moscow officials are even threatening to boycott next year’s event over the result, which saw Crimean Tatar Jamala take home the gold with her song 1944.
The song itself was reportedly written about the ethnic cleansing of her people under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin during World War II and, as the ABC reports, Jamala’s performance was widely seen as a swipe at modern Moscow over its bloody annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Russian politicians have bashed Ukraine’s “political” win, as one pro-Kremlin newspaper insisted that Moscow’s entrant was robbed in an article entitled How the European jury stole victory from Lazarev.
Russian singer Sergei Lazarev was the bookies’ favourite heading into the contest and won the public vote, but ended up finishing third behind Ukraine and Australia’s Dami Im after the judges’ votes were tallied.
“It was not the Ukrainian singer Jamala and her song 1944 that won the Eurovision 2016, it was politics that beat art,” Russian senator Frants Klintsevich told Russian news outlets, calling for Russia to sit out next year’s contest in Kiev as protest.
“If nothing changes in Ukraine by next year, then I don’t think we need to take part.”
The head of the foreign affairs committee in Russia’s upper chamber Konstantin Kochachev insisted that “according to the tally of points it was geopolitics that gained the upperhand” and seemed to insinuate that Ukraine’s winning the sequin-spangled songwriting comp could have dire implications politically, and jeopardise the stuttering peace process between the two countries.
“For that reason Ukraine lost. And not only its long-suffering budget,” he wrote on Facebook. “The thing the country needs now as much as air is peace. But war won.”
War? Sheesh.
Sore losers much?
Watch: Jamala – 1944 (Eurovision 2016)
https://youtu.be/Y1yzjoNTokk
