Last year it stole the show with a haunting, politically charged ballad about Stalin’s deportation of Crimean Tatars. Now Ukraine risks “nul points” for its hosting of the Eurovision song contest after almost all the top organisers of the 2017 event quit.
The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has warned Ukraine’s public broadcaster UA:PBC to “stick to the timeline” following the abrupt resignation last week of 21 members of the company’s senior Eurovision team, including two executive producers, the event manager and head of security.
The setback is the latest to afflict this year’s competition after reports Ukraine was having serious difficulty financing it and complaints from the Orthodox church that the choice of venue for the opening ceremony, a cathedral dating back to the 11th century, amounted to blasphemy.
While it thanked the departing team members for their work so far, the EBU, which founded the popular pan–European contest in 1956, said every effort must now be made to ensure the show goes on as planned in Kiev in May despite what it described as “staff changes”.
The broadcasting group said: “We have reiterated the importance of a speedy and efficient implementation of the plans already agreed … and that we stick to the timeline established and approved by the reference group to ensure a successful contest.”
The 2017 show’s executive producers, Victoria Romanova and Oleksandr Kharebin, and most of their team stepped down last Friday, saying in a letter published later by the Strana news site that they felt sidelined by a new event coordinator and worried by a lack of transparency in decision-making.
“Hereby we, the Eurovision team, for whom this contest has become not only part of our work but also part of our life, officially announced that we are leaving this project and stopping work on the preparation for the contest,” the signatories said.
They said preparations on the show had stopped for almost two months after Pavlo Hrytsak, the deputy head of Ukrainian state television, was appointed official event coordinator late last year – a move they said had “completely blocked” their work.
“We do not want to comment on the managerial skills, project management principles, communication skills, professional achievements, as well as the values and goals of management,” the letter continued.
Hrytsak insisted the organisers were coordinating closely with the EBU and that “everything is going on according to plan”. Ukraine’s prime minister, Volodymyr Groysman, has also insisted preparations were being conducted “properly” and “absolutely nothing threatens Eurovision”.
Ukraine won the right to stage the 62nd Eurovision contest after last year’s unexpected victory by Jamala, an ethnic Tatar from Crimea, with the controversial ballad 1944, about the wartime deportations of Tatars under Joseph Stalin.
The result annoyed Moscow but cheered many Ukrainians following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the subsequent fighting in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine. Jamala said before the contest – one of the most politicised in years – that her song also referred to more recent events in the peninsula.
Zurab Alasania, the head of Ukrainian state TV and radio, resigned last year citing a funding crisis so severe it threatened UA:PBC’s ability to host the 2017 show, while the Orthodox church has sharply criticised the choice of the historic St Sophia’s cathedral complex, a Unesco world heritage site, for the opening ceremony.
