The European Broadcasting Union’s extraordinary letter of March 23 to Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, asking him to reverse a three-year Ukraine entry ban on Russian Eurovision Song Contest entry Yulia Samoylova, exemplifies the prevailing lack of respect for the nation’s sovereignty and statehood.
Samoylova was banned for illegally entering the country. The fact that she broke Ukrainian law is uncontested: She toured Russian-annexed Crimea back in 2015, entering it from Russia.
Yet in her letter to Groysman, EBU Director General Ingrid Deltenre, with breathtaking arrogance and hypocrisy, not only presumes that the rule of law is so weak in Ukraine that the prime minister can ignore it at her behest, she also, incredibly, complains that Ukraine’s SBU security service did not consult the union before issuing the ban on Samoylova.
In a situation in which the United Kingdom, France or Germany had banned a person that had broken their laws, would Deltenre expect these countries to agree their actions with the EBU? Of course not.
Adding insult to idiocy, Deltenre goes on to threaten that the EBU might exclude Ukraine from future events if it does not reverse the ban on Samoylova. She claims several EBU members are threatening to pull out of the competition due to the ban on Russia’s entry.
Only one country has said publicly it might pull out of Eurovision – Russia, which has been waging a three-year war against Ukraine that has killed 10,000 people. It’s no song-and-dance contest.
Next, she says that the EBU is becoming “increasingly frustrated, in fact angry, that this year’s competition is being used as a tool in the ongoing confrontation between the Russian Federation and Ukraine.”
But what she does not say is Russia caused this problem. Their last-minute pick of Samoylova entry was cynically calculated to cause a scandal. Not only did they pick someone who had broken Ukrainian law by illegally entering the country, they chose a disabled artist to mock this year’s Eurovision slogan “Celebrate Diversity,” by forcing Ukraine to uphold a legal ban against a disabled person from entering the country.
If anyone politicized Eurovision, it is the Kremlin. Instead of bullying Ukraine, a nation that fights for its survival every day, the EBU should be taking strong action against Russia, the real villain.
