Penalized for a song. A Russian justice has fined the winner of a beauty contest for married women in Crimea for having broadcast a video where she interprets a Ukrainian patriotic title, the police of this annexed peninsula reported on Tuesday.
In the video released in September on social networks, two young women, including Miss Crimea 2022, Olga Valeeva, 34, sing the song a cappella. Chervona Kalina, considered by the Russian authorities to be the anthem of Ukrainian nationalists. However, since it was removed, the video has been the subject of an investigation.
Crimea’s “Interior Ministry” announced on Tuesday that it had arrested “two young women who perform the anthem of an extremist organization in a video” and published a video in which two young women, with blurred faces, offer their apologies. .
Miss Crimea apologizes
“I want to sincerely apologize for singing the song. Chervona Kalina whose message I was completely unaware of,” says one of them, who looks like Olga Valeeva.
“We sing this song without putting any symbolic connotation on it,” this model, dancer and blogger, originally from Poltava, in eastern Ukraine, also assured on her Instagram page.
According to the ministry, the two young women, born in 1987 and 1989, were found guilty of having discredited the Russian army and sentenced – one to ten days in prison and the other to a fine of 40,000 rubles (680 euros).
On September 10, another video shot at a wedding party in a restaurant in Bakhchisarai, southern Crimea, where guests sang Chervona Kalinaimposed fines and penalties ranging from 5 to 15 days in prison to its organizers and participants.
The restaurant owner also recorded a video apologizing and showing his support for the Russian offensive in Ukraine, which has been going on since the end of February.
Governor promises investigations
These incidents have drawn the ire of Crimean Governor Sergei Aksionov, who has promised to open criminal investigations against those who sing Ukrainian songs or chant pro-Ukrainian slogans.
The Chervona Kalina chorus, sung by musician Andriy Khlyvnyuk of the Ukrainian band Boombox shortly after the start of the Russian invasion, was used in April by the band Pink Floyd on the single Hey, hey, get up! whose video went around the world, in support of Ukraine.
Crimea was annexed in March 2014 by Russia, which last week also annexed four other Ukrainian regions it controls, at least partially, after referendums denounced by Kyiv and the West.
Source: BFM TV
