Moscow // Russian lawmakers on Sunday reacted angrily at arch-rival Ukraine’s “political” victory in the Eurovision song contest, as one pro-Kremlin paper insisted Moscow’s entrant was robbed.
Ukraine's Jamala struck a surprise gold in the glitzy Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday with her ballad 1944 about the deportation of the Crimean Tatars by Soviet authorities during the Second World War. The performance was widely seen as a swipe at Moscow over its annexation of the peninsula in 2014.
Russian singer Sergei Lazarev – the clear favourite with bookmakers before the contest – was beaten into third place after losing out on the national jury tallies despite claiming the most points from viewers in the public vote.
"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 newswires, calling for Russia to possibly skip next year's tournament in Ukraine.
In a show known for its playfulness and camp, 32-year-old Jamala struck a sombre tone with her lyrics about strangers coming to “kill you all”, in reference to the forced removal of ethnic Tatars by Josef Stalin during the Second World War.
Jamala, herself a Tatar, stood on the Stockholm stage singing “you think you are gods” against a blood-red backdrop.
She said her great-grandmother was one of the Crimean Tatar victims of Stalin who deported the group en masse to Central Asia after accusing them of sympathising with Nazi Germany. Many of the 200,000 deported died on the way or in exile.
Jamala pleaded for “peace and love to everyone” when collecting the trophy ahead of Australia in second place and Russia in third spot.
Russia and Ukraine have been locked in a bitter feud since Moscow annexed Crimea in February 2014 and was then accused of fuelling a bloody separatist uprising in the east of the country.
The crisis in Ukraine has pushed ties between Russia and the West to their lowest point since the end of the Cold War.
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”.
Mr Kochachev said that the Eurovision victory could embolden Ukraine’s pro-western leadership and see an already stuttering peace process to end the conflict in the east jeopardised even further.
“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.”
Mass-circulation tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda ran an online article entitled "How the European jury stole victory from Lazarev".
The outlet called for the results to be reviewed because of the “political” content of Jamala’s song and warned gay spectators they face a rough reception in Ukraine next year.
“It became obvious that this is an entirely political story – as we won first place in the public vote that was meant to counterbalance the juries.”
While the Eurovision voting has long been tainted by political alliances among competitor countries, songs are not allowed to be political but Jamala’s entry seemed to come close to breaking that rule.
Event organiser, the European Broadcasting Union, said Ukraine’s offering did not contain political speech and therefore did not break the contest’s rules.
“The song refers to a historical fact and Jamala makes reference to a story that happened in her family,” EBU director general Ingrid Deltenre said after the show.
She said the song referred to what happened in 1944 and not recent events.
* Agence-France Presse and Reuters