Ukraine will be hosting the Eurovision Song Contest. That statement was made clear today as EBU have been assured that the country is ready to host the contest. Following months of delays, resignations and doubts we can now prepare ourselves for Eurovision 2017 in Kyiv.
This is the news that we have all been waiting for. We now have confirmation that the Eurovision Song Contest will take place in Kyiv in 2017.
However, there is still more work to be done. Jon Ola Sand stated that that NTU and the authorities in Kyiv have made good progress over the last weeks and this will be closely monitored moving forward. He added that the core team at NTU are now in place and that the Reference Group have full confidence in them to overcome the challenges that remain.
The next reference group meeting is expected to take place in January 2017 along with the allocation draw for the semi final
The announcement comes just one day after Ukraine’s President, Petro Poroshenko made amendments to the law to make it easier to procure goods and services needed for the contest. A statement from Poroshenko’s office said “Implementation of the law will ensure quality training for “Eurovision” in compliance with the specified terms of work and create conditions for rapid decision-making in the field of public procurement of goods, works and services required for the preparation and holding of this event”.
Timeline of events
- 14th May 2016 – Jamala was crowned the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest 2016. Her song 1944 placed second in both the jury and the televote. However, combining these scores together it scored more points than Dami Im’s Sound of silence and was declared the winner of the competition
- 22nd July 2016 – Out of the six cities that had expressed an interest to host the contest, just three were shortlisted. These were Kyiv, Dnipro and Odessa.
- 27th July 2016 – The date when the host city was to be confirmed. However, this was delayed due to concerns about suitable venues.
- 9th September 2016 – After three sets of delays and a war of words between officials from Kyiv and Odessa, Kyiv was finally selected to host Eurovision in 2017.
- 1st November 2016 – Things were thrown into even more dispute in October when Zurab Alasania, Director General of the NTU resigned over budget concerns.
- 4th November 2016– Following Albania’s resignation just days before. It was expected that his deputy and head of delegation Victoria Romanova would step into his shoes. However Yevhen Nyschuk, Ukraine’s Minister of Culture stepped in and took over the responsibility of organizing the contest.
- 14th November 2016 -A key press conference with the EBU was cancelled. The cause of cancellation was due to severe and unexpected snow fall in the capital. Some felt this was a tactic delay as even though there were some cancelled flights, public transport was back up and running within a couple of hours. The press conference took place the following day.
- 27th November 2016 – Oleksandr Kherabin, Acting Director General at NTU announced that the EBU may decide to take the 2017 contest away from Ukraine.
- 1st December 2016 – The executive producers of the contest were announced by the EBU. These were confirmed to be Victoria Romanova, Aleksandr Kherabin, Stuart Barlow. Denis Bloschinskiy was announced as the local event manager.
- 4th December 2016 – An anonymous member of the reference group spoke to German newspaper Bild. It was reported that the contest could be moved to Russia if Ukraine can not handle the preparations.
- 5th December 2016 – The 2004 Eurovision winner Ruslana and Prime Minister of Ukraine Volodymyr Groysman hit back at the “propaganda” and stated that Ukraine are ready to host Eurovision.
- 7th December 2016 – It was reported that the EBU were in negotiations with Ukraine to reverse the decision to ‘black list’ certain Russian artists to enter Ukraine.
- 8th December 2016 – The European Broadcasting Union announced that Ukraine will host the Eurovision song contest in 2017.
You can see how Ukraine won the Eurovision Song Contest 2016 by viewing Jamala’s performance of 1944 below:
