KIEV/MOSCOW: Ukrainians hailed their country’s unexpected victory in the Eurovision song contest as a Europe-wide endorsement of Ukraine in its smouldering conflict with Russia, while Moscow said the contest had been hijacked by politics.
Ukrainian singer Jamala overtook the bookmakers’ favourites, Russia and Australia, to lift the prize with the song “1944” about the war-time deportations of ethnic Tatars from Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula by Soviet dictator Stalin.
The singer, herself of Crimean Tatar descent, had drawn parallels in interviews to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, which provoked Western condemnation of the Kremlin, and was opposed by many in the region’s Tatar …read more
Source: The News International
