Ukraine wins 2022 Eurovision song contest as UK finishes second in Turin

[mysteryowl]

Source: Guardian

Ukraine has won the 66th Eurovision song contest, which was held on Saturday evening in Turin in Italy. Riding a tidal wave of support from the telephone-voting European public, Stefania by Kalush Orchestra finished first after strong showings by the United Kingdom, Spain and Sweden in the early voting.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, welcomed the victory, Ukraine’s third since its 2003 Eurovision debut, and said “we will do our best” to one day host the contest in the port city of Mariupol. He underlined “Ukrainian Mariupol. Free, peaceful, rebuilt!”

“I am sure our victorious chord in the battle with the enemy is not far off,’’ Zelenskiy said in a post on the Telegram messaging app.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/may/15/ukraine-wins-2022-eurovision-song-contest-as-uk-finishes-second-in-turin

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[lillypaddle]

1. Bravest and COOLEST people

in the world!

[gademocrat7]

2. Bravo, Kalush Orchestra! 👏👏🇺🇦🇺🇦💙

[Walleye]

3. Putin is a moron if he thinks these people are ever gonna give up

[vanlassie]

4. And they threw Russia out of the competition this year.

“Fuck off, Putin.”

[AllyCat]

5. Love this! So much energy.

The official video is moving, but politics were supposed to stay out of the contest. If you get a chance, check out the official video on their YouTube channel. Filmed in Irpin, Bucha, and other areas hit hard by the RF.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. Eurovision 2022: Russian vote hacking attempt foiled, police say

Pro-Russian hackers attempted to disrupt voting for the Eurovision Song Contest, Italian police have said.

Ukraine won the competition thanks to huge support in the public vote. Russia was banned following its invasion.

Police in Italy, where this year's contest was staged, said the Killnet hacker group targeted the first semi-final - in which Ukraine performed - as well as Saturday's grand final.
...
"Various computer attacks of a DDOS [distributed denial-of-service] nature aimed at network infrastructures during voting operations and singing performances were mitigated," a police statement said.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-61463364

(For those who don't know, Eurovision voting is now done in 2 parts - each country has a music profession jury which ranks the entries, giving up to 12 points to a country; and then a phone-in vote during the contest from the public in each country is also used to give another set of points up to 12. The jury votes placed Ukraine well, but not top - they presumably tried to be objectively, musically - while the avalanche of the public vote for Ukraine was unprecedented.)

Also:

In the analysis of jury voting by the European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU) pan-European voting partner after the Second Dress Rehearsal of the Second Semi-Final of the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest, certain irregular voting patterns were identified in the results of six countries.

In order to comply with the Contest’s Voting Instructions, the EBU worked with its voting partner to calculate a substitute aggregated result for each country concerned for both the Second-Semi Final and the Grand Final (calculated based on the results of other countries with similar voting records).

This process was acknowledged by the Independent Voting Monitor.

The EBU takes any suspected attempts to manipulate the voting at the Eurovision Song Contest extremely seriously and has the right to remove such votes in accordance with the Official Voting Instructions, irrespective of whether or not such votes are likely to influence the results and/or outcome of the voting.

https://eurovision.tv/mediacentre/release/ebu-statement-voting-during-2022-shows

The six countries who had their jury votes removed are:

Azerbaijan
Georgia
Montenegro
Poland
Romania
San Marino

https://eurovisionworld.com/esc/eurovision-2022-votes-from-six-national-juries-removed

And as the BBC point out, the jury votes for Azerbaijan, Romania and Georgia were not announced via a live link up to that country (an essential feature of Eurovision since the beginning, and frequently an embarrassing over-the-top performance), but by a Eurovision official in the Italian host venue. So those countries may have been objecting to being overridden.