Russian Wheelchairs, the New 'Invasion Threat'

The banning of Russia’s Eurovision contestant Yulia Samoilova by the Kiev regime is a new low – if that regime could possibly stoop any lower.

As a result of this week’s imposed travel restriction, it means that the artist will not be able to attend the forthcoming annual Eurovision Song Contest which is being held in Kiev on May 13.

28-year-old Yulia, who is bound to a wheelchair due to a childhood muscular condition, was this week banned from entering Ukraine by the Kiev regime. That’s because she earlier “violated” a controversial Ukrainian law that blocks Russian citizens from visiting Crimea, when she performed on the Black Sea peninsula back in 2015.

Russia’s foreign ministry responded angrily, saying that the exclusion of the singer was yet another expression of blatant “Russophobia” and “paranoia”.

This follows the banning of Russian athletes at last year’s Olympic Games in Brazil over trumped-up doping charges.

The organizers of the annual song contest, the European Broadcasting Union, were not involved in Kiev’s decision to ban the Russian artist. The EBU said in a statement that it was “deeply disappointed in this decision as we feel it goes against both the spirit of the contest, and the notion of inclusivity that lies at the heart of its values”.

So much for “European values”, which the Ukrainian authorities claim to aspire to! Banning a wheelchair-bound artist over some arcane law that the dubious parliament in Kiev has concocted to shore up its equally dubious claim over Crimean territory.

But this is kind of abject nonsense that the European Union (as well as Washington and NATO) has embroiled itself in ever since it backed a violent coup to overthrow the Ukrainian government in February 2014.

The regime that seized power in Kiev has turned that country into a lawless fiefdom run by oligarchs and Neo-Nazi paramilitaries. Any “laws” that this regime has enacted since February 2014 could arguably be challenged as illegal, given the unconstitutional nature of the self-declared “authorities” in Kiev.

In any case, the status of Crimea legally shifted to be part of the Russian Federation through a referendum held in March 2014. Like the eastern Ukrainian Donbass region, Crimea refused to recognize the newly installed regime in Kiev as having legitimacy.

Ever since, the Kiev regime has blockaded Crimea and Donbass. Only for Russian military forces legally present in Crimea, the Kiev junta led by its so-called President Petro Poroshenko would have launched aggression on the peninsula as it has done on Donbass.

Caught up in its own complicity and contradictions, the European Union, as with NATO, is obliged to support the Kiev regime with billions of dollars worth of financial loans and turn a blind eye to its bloody campaign of terror on the people of Donbass.

This support is in spite of the fact that the Western-backed Kiev junta has openly glorified Second World War Nazi partisans like Stepan Bandera; and in spite of the fact that modern-day Neo-Nazi paramilitaries have carried out countless crimes against humanity on the ethnic Russian citizens of eastern Ukraine.

The daily bombardment of towns and villages in Donbass by Kiev regime forces goes hand in hand with an economic blockade which has seen pensions and bank services cut off to civilians.

In Kiev, Russian-owned banks have been attacked by pro-regime gangs.

Several journalists critical of the junta have been murdered over the past three years.

The Kiev regime is floundering from its own illegitimacy and corruption. Even in parts of Ukraine where it supposedly claims to have support, such as in the western Lviv region, its credibility among ordinary people there is shot through. Poroshenko and his junta are seen as nothing but hucksters who have ransacked the country for their own self-enrichment.

This week Poroshenko has been waving the begging bowl yet again to his European and American patrons, pleading for more loans from the International Monetary Fund, which shamefully has already doled out billions of dollars to prop up the regime.

Russophobia whipped up endlessly by the usurpers in Kiev has served up to now as a kind of desperate lifeline. Every problem assailing Ukraine has been of the Kiev regime’s own making. But it turns around every time and blames all its woes on “Russian aggression”.

Begging for international finance to cover up for its own spectacular corruption and mismanagement, the Kiev junta plays the Russian card. Over and over again. Ukraine, the regime claims, is a defensive line between Europe and Russia – so give us more money!

For months, the Western media unquestioningly relayed hysterical claims put out by the Kiev junta that Russian tanks were rolling into eastern Ukraine. Notice how that “invasion” has somehow vanished. The only tanks rolling into eastern Ukraine are those belonging to the Kiev regime, aided and abetted by NATO and Western media disinformation.

The “Russian tanks” story has gradually disappeared from Western news media because eventually, without facts, the claim just can’t be sustained.

Desperate to come up with some veneer for its hollow claims of Russian aggression, the hucksters in Kiev have found a new “threat”. Russian wheelchairs rolling into Ukraine.

Wheelchair-bound singer Yulia Samoilova must be banished from Ukrainian territory because she is “obviously” part of a Russian vanguard to destabilize the already-teetering Kiev regime.

With an estimated global TV audience of 200 million tuning into the Eurovision Song Contest, a beautiful performance by Yulia might just destroy the propaganda narrative that the Russians are “evil people”. Such a horrible reality cannot be allowed to shatter the Kiev regime’s broken record of Russophobia.

You could not make this up, but the Kiev regime is even now claiming that their callous ban on the Russian singer is actually a clever plot designed by the Kremlin – to discredit them in the eyes of the world. It is being claimed that the Kremlin “always knew” that the singer would be banned because of her earlier “illegal” performance in Crimea.

Sooner or later, the Western public are going to realize that their governments have hooked them up with a deranged bunch of Nazi-loving despots in Kiev. This regime has siphoned off Western taxpayers’ money for the past three years, while carrying out a war of aggression on the people of Ukraine, and at any moment willing to start World War III with its crazed Russophobia.

The heartless banning of a disabled Russian singer from the Eurovision Song Contest for “political points” is a measure of how deranged this Western-backed regime in Kiev is.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.