COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Finland said on Friday it will not send contestants to the Eurovision 2022 final if Russia is allowed to participate, while other European public broadcasters, including Ukraine, called for Russia to be expelled from the song contest.
The calls come after Russian military forces on Thursday began an invasion of neighbouring Ukraine, prompting economic sanctions against Russia and stripping the country of major sport events.
Finland’s public broadcaster Yle said on Friday it had appealed to the Eurovision organizer, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), to have Russia excluded from the event.
“Yle will not participate in the contest if Russia is invited,” it said in a statement.
The EBU said on Thursday in a widely published statement that the contest was a “non-political cultural event” and that they were “currently planning” to host participants from Russia.
“We of course will continue to monitor the situation closely,” they said. Repeated requests for comment went unanswered on Friday.
Public broadcasters in Ukraine, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Lithuania and Norway all urged the EBU to expel Russia.
“The European Broadcasting Union has to reconsider,” said Hanna Stjarne, head of Sweden’s SVT.
“I sympathize with the thought of Eurovision being a nonpolitical event. However, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the situation in Europe is extremely serious,” she said.
The Eurovision final, which is one of the world’s largest televised events, is scheduled to take place at the PalaOlimpico stadium in Turin, Italy, on May 14.
Russia, which has yet to put forward a contestant this year, has participated 23 times since its first appearance in 1994 and won the contest in 2008.
The chairman of Ukraine’s public broadcaster Suspilne, Mykola Chernotytsky, said in an open letter to the EBU that “Russia’s participation as an aggressor and violator of international law in this year’s Eurovision undermines the very idea of the competition.”
He said that Russia’s state broadcaster was a “leading element of the Russian government’s information war against Ukraine.”
Russia was one of the favourites to win the competition in 2016, when Crimean Tatar singer Susana Jamaladinova of Ukraine, known as Jamala, unexpectedly won with a song about Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s deportation of hundreds of thousands of people from her Black Sea homeland, two years after Russia annexed the territory.
The following year, Ukraine barred Russia’s entry for the contest from entering the country.
(Reporting by Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen and Essi Lethi; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
