On May 14, while on the stage of the PalaOlimpico in Turin i Kalush Orchestra celebrated the victory of the 66th edition of Eurovision, the largest European music competition, the reaction of the Russian and pro-Russian media was not long in coming.
“No, in the current situation Eurovision should just explode. Missile Satan. An idea for the future for Bild“. We read in a post published on the social profiles of Yuliya Vityazeva, presenter of the television channel Russia-1, in which it refers to the German newspaper. The message, which ends with a winking emoticon, is still visible on her Telegram channel, while Vityazeva’s Twitter profile has been suspended.
Today the Russian journalist, a well-known face also in Italy for having been a guest on various talk-shows, published another post on her Telegram channel in which she explains that she was misunderstood. “When the German newspaper Bild published the news that Putin was trying to hack Eurovision, I reacted by writing that a headline about how the Russian president wanted to blow up the stage of the competition would have been more striking. ”
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But there were several messages from Russian journalists and columnists against Eurovision and the victory of the Ukrainian band. In an article in the Russian newspaper Aif in Moscow, Vladimir Polupanov called the competition a “boring, politicized television” with a “bad smell of rotting swamp”. Polupanov then wrote that “almost none of the winners, with the exception of Abba, have become a big star”.
Disturbing images were posted on another Telegram channel, according to the Ukrainian news agency UKrinform. The hashtag Eurovision2022 was written on a bomb, along with phrases spoken by the Kalush Orchestra on the Turin stage: “Help Ukraine, Mariupol. “Help Ukraine, Mariupol. Help Azovstal, now!”.
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