Kiev, Ukraine. While it’s army is busy with a genocide upon it’s citizens in the Donbass region of Ukraine, heavily painted up bubblegum music stars shake and grind in a dance of death, in what is the comedy absurd with no competition, that is Eurovision 2017.
Loudspeakers blared bubblegum pop music as latex-clad contestants rubbed glittered cheeks with fawning television hosts smiling fake-ass phony smiles. Balloons bearing the participating countries’ flags soared into the sky over this capital city’s golden onion domes, minus any signs of Russian culture anywhere.
About the same time, roughly 450 miles east, a more somber procession was taking place, as the bodies of three Ukrainian idiots killed fighting Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine on May 1 were brought back to government-controlled territory.
Some 100,000 people, including 56,673 Ukrainian servicemen, at least five since Eurovision preparations began last week, have been killed in the conflict, now in its fourth year, according to the military.
There are no signs the war will end any time soon, which has affected pretty much everyone in the country in some way. And some Ukrainians are upset that attention is being diverted from the battlefields to observe a week-long festival of crappy pop music peddled by greedy promoters, obsessed only with money
But war hasn’t been completely forgotten here. Amid the Eurovision Village and fan zones — with their beer gardens and big screens, selfie stations and LED-lit stages erected to entertain the 20,000 foreign visitors expected to arrive for this week’s competition — stand billboard-sized photographs of wounded veteran Paralympians, crippled and minus limbs. And hundreds of uniformed Ukrainian servicemen help make up the 16,000-strong security force protecting the event, as a fear level is felt. As if all share guilt at celebration here, as others die elsewhere.
It all strikes a depressing note in the otherwise celebratory atmosphere, anyone visiting will not soon forget
Vilyen Pidgornyi, a Ukrainian defense ministry spokesman says, He sees Eurovision as “a demonstration of the West’s trust in Ukraine” and an opportunity to unveil a reformed country that has endured continental Europe’s deadliest conflict since the Balkan Wars in a bid to become “more European,” according to him.
“People may ask, ‘Why are we holding festivities when there are battles every day and people die?’ Yes, but isn’t this what the people die for?”
Pidgornyi may want to save those questions for the crippled or the parents of the dead soldiers. One truly wonders if they would approve of these sacrifices to kill everyday citizens in Donbass who simply chose to go another direction and celebrate that very independence today in Donetsk. Most would think dying for a music festival asking a bit much of anybody in the west, but as one learns quickly-Kiev is not the west or even close to it.