When the Eurovision Song Contest starts today in Kiev, Ukraine, one country will be noticeably absent: Russia is sitting out the competition. The supposedly unifying contest has been the stage of tensions between the two countries for the past several years.Ukraine was last year’s winner, and therefore this year’s host country, but its 2016 victory was not without controversy. Despite Eurovision’s explicit ban on political lyrics, the country’s contestant Jamala sang “1944,” which she said she wrote about her family’s removal from Crimea amid Joseph Stalin’s mass deportations of Crimean Tatars. The Muslim Turkic ethnic minority now makes up almost …read more
Source: The Atlantic
