Vice-head of government of the peninsula criticizes abuse of the Eurovision Song Contest
According to a poll conducted by 112 Ukraina TV channel, 72 percent of Ukrainians do not believe that the Russian Federation will return the rule over Crimea, which belonged to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from 1954 to 1991 and to Ukraine from 1991 to 2014, to the government in Kiev. 12 percent of the respondents chose the following answer to this question "Possibly, but not in the foreseeable future", another 15 percent believe that this is due to "the constant political and economic prere on Russia" also possible in the foreseeable future, he said.
The Kiev leadership continues to be an adherent of this minority opinion: Interior Minister Arsen Avakov says that a special unit of the National Guard is being trained specifically for this purpose, and President Petro Poroshenko told the Vesti radio station that the process of returning Crimea is "extremely difficult", but also "promising" and had already begun. Specifically, he is having his Security and Defense Council examine how Russia could be sued in international courts. The Ministry of Defense and the General Staff are to work out plans to develop the city of Kherson, located northwest of Crimea, and other Black Sea ports.
The Ukrainian domestic intelligence service Sluschba Bespeky Ukrajiny (SBU) is also to ensure that sailors from ships calling at ports in Crimea no longer disembark in Ukraine. The ban will be in force for three years. Shipowners wishing to call in both areas during this period must apply for a special permit in Kiev.
The "Fight against annexation on all fronts", as Rada deputy Georgi Logwinski put it, also includes investigations against employees of foreign companies if they use maps on which Crimea is not part of Ukraine. Therefore, the Coca-Cola corporation already exchanged a graphic.
Jamala – 1944
Another front is the pop song contest Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), which this year will be held from 10. until 14. May in the Swedish capital Stockholm. There, Ukraine let itself be taken over by Sanger Susana Dzhamaladinova, who grew up in Kyrgyzstan, alias "Jamala" represent whose mother is Armenian and whose father is a Crimean Tatar.
In 1944 she sings a song with a Crimean Tatar refrain about the expulsion of her ethnic group by the Georgian Josef Stalin from the peninsula to which Hitler wanted to resettle the Sud Tyroleans. Ruslan Balbek, the (also Crimean Tatar) deputy prime minister of the Crimean regional government, criticized the decision as an abuse of his ethnic group’s fate and warned of a "political spectacle", Kiev is trying to suggest to TV viewers in other countries that Crimean Tatars are currently being persecuted by resorting to a 72-year-old tragedy.
Jamala described Balbek as a "talented sanger". Doubting this has not made Kiev punishable – unlike unwanted revisions to the status of Crimea. Participants from other states also raise the question of why the spectacle is financed to a large extent by compulsory fees: Virtually all of the contestants who are already known come across either as caricatures of the inhabitants of their countries of origin – or as failed attempts to be exactly what they are not, which is true, for example, of German casting show winner Jamie-Lee Kriewitz.