Ukraine names Kiev as Eurovision 2017 host city

Ukraine announced today that Kiev would host the Eurovision 2017 song contest after its singer Jamala won this year's competition.

After a month-long battle between three semifinalists - Kiev, Odessa and Dnipro - the National Television Company of Ukraine (NTU) lifted the veil of secrecy at a press conference that had been rescheduled several times.

"Kiev was selected to be the host city of the Eurovision 2017", NTU chief Zurab Alasania announced.

Jamala won with a tribute to her Tatar people's deportation from Russian-annexed Crimea in 1944 - a song that incensed Russia.

Culture Minister Yevgen Nyshchuk said security concerns influenced the jury, who gave 19 votes to Kiev, two to the Black Sea port of Odessa, but none to Dnipro, which is less than 100 kilometres from Ukraine's eastern war zone.
 

"The issue of security in Trans-Dniester affected Odessa, and its proximity to the frontline affected Dnipro," Nyshchuk said.

Trans-Dniester is a pro-Russian breakaway region of Ukraine's southwestern neighbour, Moldova.

Cash-strapped Ukraine intends to spend at least 1.2 billion hryvnias (USD 45 million) on the show itself and to upgrade the Kiev arena at which the globally-televised event will be held.

"Congratulations to the people of Kiev!", Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko tweeted.

Jamala won the May 2016 contest in Stockholm with a powerful ballad, "1944," about Stalin's deportation of her great-grandmother and 240,000 other Crimeans.

Memories of that wartime horror were revived in 2014 by Russia's seizure of Crimea several weeks after a pro-EU revolt ousted Ukraine's Moscow-backed president.

A pro-Russian insurgency in the industrial southeast of Ukraine that has killed nearly 9,600 people broke out in April 2014.

Tatars are ethnic Muslims who were accused by Stalin of collaborating with the Nazis and transported in cattle cars from Crimea to far-flung regions of the Soviet Union - a journey that nearly half the people failed to survive.