Eurovision fans will surely have noticed we haven’t seen a Russian act this year: Russia were barred from competing in the contest of 2022 in Italy due to the invasion of Ukraine. Now Detector Media report that the Executive Committee of the EBU have taken the unanimous decision to suspend their Russian member broadcasters!

The broadcasters in question are RTR, Channel One and Radio Dom Ostankino. Last year, the same decision was taken regarding the Belarusian broadcaster BTRC.

To inform the other member broadcaster of this decision, an email was sent out. This contained the following quote from Eric Campbell, Secretary to Governing Bodies at the EBU:

On behalf of the Executive Committee, I would like to inform you of the decision taken by the Council on three Russian members of the EBU (RTR, Channel One and Radio Dom Ostankino) at its meeting yesterday. Based on the measures taken by the Executive Council at its last meeting on April 7, when it launched the suspension procedure, the Council unanimously decided to immediately suspend the three Russian members of the EBU indefinitely, which the Executive Board will review regularly.

Mykola Chernotytskiy, Chairman of the Board of Public Broadcasting in Ukraine, welcomes this decision with the following statement:

Public Broadcasting welcomes the position of the Executive Council on the suspension of the membership of the Russian media in the European Broadcasting Union. Because, violating journalistic standards, spreading hate speech and misinformation, these broadcasters are waging an information war not only against Ukraine, but also against the entire civilized world.

The three broadcaster have, in accordance with the EBU statutes, the opportunity to appeal to this decision but in that case, the suspension will remain in place until a final decision has been reached anyway.

The last Russian entry to date was Manizha’s ‘Russian Woman’ in Rotterdam last year: