A Russian court has fined the winner of a beauty pageant for married women in Crimea for posting a video of her performing a Ukrainian patriotic song, police in the annexed peninsula said on Tuesday.
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In the video released in September on social media, two young women, including Miss Crimea 2022, Olga Valeeva, 34, sing the song a capella Red Kalinaconsidered by the Russian authorities as the anthem of Ukrainian nationalists.
Since deleted, the video has however been the subject of an investigation.
The “Ministry of the Interior” of Crimea announced on Tuesday that it had arrested “two young women who perform the anthem of an extremist organization in a video”.
He posted a video where two young women, their faces blurred, apologize.
“I want to sincerely apologize for singing the song Red Kalina whose message I was completely unaware of,” said one of them, who looks like Olga Valeeva.
“We sang this song without putting any symbolic connotations on it,” the model, dancer and blogger from Poltava, in eastern Ukraine, also assured on her Instagram page.
The two young women, born in 1987 and 1989, were convicted of discrediting the Russian military and sentenced — one to 10 days in jail and the other to a 40,000 ruble fine, according to the ministry. (680 euros).
On September 10, another video shot at a wedding party at a restaurant in Bakhchisarai in southern Crimea, where guests were singing Red Kalinaearned fines and penalties ranging from 5 to 15 days in prison to its organizers and participants.
The restaurant owner also recorded a video where he apologized and showed his support for the Russian offensive in Ukraine, which has been underway since the end of February.
These incidents have provoked the ire of Crimean Governor Sergei Aksionov, who has promised to open criminal investigations once morest those who sing Ukrainian songs or chant pro-Ukrainian slogans.
The chorus of Red Kalinasung by musician Andriy Khlyvnyuk, of the Ukrainian group Boombox shortly following the start of the Russian invasion, was used in April by the group Pink Floyd in the single Hey, Hey, Rise Up ! whose video went around the world, in support of Ukraine.
Crimea was annexed in March 2014 by Russia, which also attached four other Ukrainian regions last week which it controls at least partially following referendums denounced by kyiv and the West.