[ad_1]
This week, there were reminders on every street corner in Liverpool that the northern English city hosted the Eurovision Song Contest as a stand-in for last year’s winner, Ukraine, where the war continues to rage more than a year after Russia’s full-scale. invasion.
Inflatable songbirds decorated with patterns from traditional Ukrainian embroidery on the streets. In the center of the city, sandbags cover the monument as part of an art installation that mimics measures taken to protect statues in the war-torn country. Everywhere there were blue-yellow flags.
But perhaps the most visible reminder of Ukraine’s centrality to the event being held in a British city nearly 2,000 miles from Kyiv was the presence of thousands of Ukrainians who fled the war at home.
Among them is Anastasyia Sydorenko, 33, who fled with her 6-year-old daughter Pauline to Liverpool after the war broke out in February 2022. She has a ticket to the Eurovision final on Saturday night.
“I think we are in Ukraine now,” Sydorenko said. “Everywhere I see Ukrainian flags, Ukrainian signs, more Ukrainians wearing national clothes. It’s really cold, my heart is really warm.”
They will join thousands of displaced Ukrainians living in the UK who took part in the Eurovision Song Contest this week after around 3,000 deeply discounted tickets were offered. The attendees were just a fraction of the more than 120,000 Ukrainians who came to the UK as part of a sponsorship program launched last year.
“We felt that if this is going to reflect Ukraine, you need Ukrainians in the audience,” said Stuart Andrew, Britain’s Eurovision minister. “This is an opportunity for us, in a more festive way, to show solidarity with the people who are here,” he said.
Last summer, the Eurovision organizers did not hold the contest in Ukraine, and England, whose act, Sam Ryder, has already finished second in the 2022 competition, was asked to host it.
“We want everyone to have fun, but at the same time there is a serious message here, that this has to happen in Ukraine today,” Andrew said. “And the fact that it isn’t is a reminder of the brutality of Putin and his regime.”
Andrew said that the demand for discount tickets was very high, with more than 9,000 Ukrainians applying, and it was nice to see a show “that just for a few hours in the evening did not think about the problem of displacement.”
That, like Sydorenko, they were lucky enough to get tickets described as a bright spot in a difficult year. Sydorenko hails from the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, where he hid in a basement for 10 days when war first hit his country.
Eventually, they escaped in a convoy of cars filled with women and children and crossed the border, then into Latvia, he said.
“Mentally and psychologically, it’s difficult, because something is different, everything is new,” added Sydorenko.
He then fled to England after connecting online with Elisse Jones, a Liverpool resident who offered to host Sydorenko, his daughter, sister-in-law and nephew. Therefore, it is not easy for children who do not know the language.
“They didn’t say a word of English before, and now it’s scouse,” says Jones, referring to the Liverpudlian lilt now clearly detectable in the children’s English.
“She’s like a little sponge,” Sydorenko said with a smile, putting her hand on her daughter’s head and describing how she behaves at school.
Two days before the Eurovision final, Sydorenko joined a group of Ukrainian women who opened a collaborative exhibition called “The Displaced: Ukrainian Women of Liverpool” in an art space in the city. The project features portraits of – and interviews with – 24 women who fled to Liverpool.
Sydorenko, one of the founders of the project, describes it as a form of therapy for many women. The exhibition is one of many poignant reflections on the impact of the war in Ukraine on display in Liverpool this week.
The Eurovision celebrations also draw in Ukrainians living around the UK who travel far and wide to participate. Oksana Pitun, 39, and her daughter, Daniella, 12, who live with a host family in Southampton – on the south coast of England – left home on a bus at 5:40 am to see the semi-finals on Saturday night. The trip took more than seven hours, and he planned to get home on the night bus once the competition was over.
But Pitun said, he was very happy because he was able to get a reduced ticket.
“We feel we are supporting our country by doing this,” Pitun said. “And it’s also great fun to go somewhere, be a part of something, and not think about the war.”
On Thursday evening, Pitun and her daughter visited the Ukrainian Boulevard at Liverpool docks, a place for Eurovision fans to experience Ukrainian art and culture. Daniella conversed with the volunteers in her mother tongue and smoothly switched back and forth to English.
While many Ukrainians have sought refuge here, wanting to return to their country once it is safe, others have begun to feel comfortable in the UK.
Tanya Kuzmenko, 34, already was traveling in Sri Lanka with her boyfriend, who is British, in February 2022 when she woke up to the news of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“We can’t believe it, we’re shocked,” he said. He felt he could not return to Ukraine, so he applied to join his girlfriend’s family at their home near Liverpool under a sponsorship program. He moved here last summer.
Late last year, he started his own digital agency, and he said he would love to see Liverpool, which has been his second home for the past year, host Eurovision on behalf of Ukraine. While he couldn’t get tickets for the contest event, he spent the week attending concerts in the EuroVillage fan area.
He joined the Ukrainian crowd on Thursday night to see a performance by Jamala, the Crimean Tatar singer who won Eurovision in 2016. The Ukrainian flag draped over his shoulders and his blond hair blowing in the wind, Kuzmenko. swayed to the music, a smile on his face.
He said Britons have come to see him wearing the flag to voice support for Ukraine or show his ties to the country.
“When I came last year, there were only one or two flags, and now the whole town has flags,” he said. “I feel proud. We’re included, and that’s awesome.
[ad_2]
Source link