TURIN, Italy: Kalush Orchestra are aiming to “lift the spirits” of their fellow Ukrainians by riding a wave of public support to win the Eurovision Song Contest in the Italian city of Turin on Saturday night.
Their entry “Stefania,” sung in Ukrainian, fuses rap with traditional folk music and is a tribute to frontman Oleh Psiuk’s mother.
The bookmakers have made it the clear favorite for the annual contest, which normally draws a television audience of close to 200 million, based on the plight of Ukraine following Russia’s invasion in February.
“Any victory in any aspect is very important for Ukraine these days, so winning the Eurovision Song Contest of course would lift the spirits of so many Ukrainians while we don’t have much good news these days,” Psiuk told Reuters in an interview on Thursday.
The band takes its name from the Western Ukrainian city of Kalush. It finished second in the country’s national song contest but replaced winner Alina Pash after controversy over a visit she made to Crimea in 2015, a year after it was annexed by Russia.
“We are here to showcase Ukrainian culture because attempts are being made these days to kill Ukrainian culture, and we want to show that Ukrainian culture is alive, it’s unique, and it has its own beautiful signature,” Psiuk added.
One of the regular band members has stayed behind in Ukraine to help defend Kyiv, according to Psiuk, who added that he planned to return home after Eurovision and resume work with a volunteer group trying to find accommodation and medicine for his compatriots.
“Even here, outside Ukraine, we are worried about our family members that stay there, and you wake up every morning without being sure whether everyone you love is still alive and where another missile could hit,” he added.
Russia, which says it is conducting a “special military operation” in Ukraine, has been excluded from the contest this year.
Italy is hosting after winning last year with Maneskin’s rocky “Zitti e Buoni” (Shut Up and Behave).
The contest is decided by a combination of votes by the official jury and viewers from participating nations.
Eurovision fans, converging on Turin for an event that combines glitz, energy and a fair dollop of eccentricity, welcome the chance to let their hair down.
“Eurovision is like a bridge to that normal life we had before the war started,” Vitalii Lirnyk, a member of the official Ukrainian Eurovision fan club, said in Turin.
“And maybe, for like a couple of minutes, for an hour a day, we can just feel safe and normal,” added Lirnyk, who has lived in the United States for the past few years.
Ukraine’s Kalush Orchestra seek to lift spirits at Eurovision
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Ukraine’s Kalush Orchestra seek to lift spirits at Eurovision
- Their entry "Stefania", sung in Ukrainian, fuses rap with traditional folk music and is a tribute to frontman Oleh Psiuk's mother
- The bookmakers have made it the clear favourite for the annual contest based on the plight of Ukraine following Russia's invasion in February
This handout photograph released on Jan. 21, 2026, shows a view of prehistoric cave paintings in the Sulawesi island of Indonesia, which includes faded hand stencils dated to at least 67,800 years ago. (AFP Photo/Maxime Aubert/Griffith University)
- Newly dated artworks are believed to have been created by ancestors of indigenous Australians
- Discovery shows Sulawesi as one of world’s oldest centers of artistic culture, researcher says
JAKARTA: Hand stencils found in a cave in Indonesia’s Sulawesi are the world’s oldest known artworks, Indonesian and Australian archeologists have said in a new study that dates the drawings back to at least 67,800 years ago.
Sulawesi hosts some of the world’s earliest cave art, including the oldest known example of visual storytelling — a cave painting depicting human-like figures interacting with a wild pig. Found in 2019, it dates back at least 51,200 years.
On Muna, an island off the province’s southeast, researchers have discovered new artworks which are faint and partially obscured by a more recent motif on the wall. They used a new dating technique to determine their age.
The cave art is of two faded hand stencils, one at least 60,900 years old and another dating back at least 67,800 years. This makes it the oldest art to be found on cave walls, authors of the study, which was published this week, said in the journal Nature.
Adhi Agus Oktaviana, a researcher at the National Research and Innovation Agency, or BRIN, and co-author, said this hand stencil was 16,600 years older than the rock art previously documented in the Maros-Pangkep caves in Sulawesi, and about 1,100 years older than stencils found in Spain believed to have been drawn by Neanderthals.
The discovery “places Indonesia as one of the most important centers in the early history of symbolic art and modern human seafaring. This discovery is the oldest reliably dated rock art and provides direct evidence that humans have been intentionally crossing the ocean since almost 70,000 years ago,” Oktaviana said on Wednesday.
The stencils are located in Liang Metanduno, a limestone cave on Muna that has been a tourist destination known for cave paintings that are about 4,000 years old.
“This discovery demonstrates that Sulawesi is one of the oldest and most continuous centers of artistic culture in the world, with roots dating back to the earliest phases of human habitation in the region,” said Prof. Maxime Aubert of Australia, another of the study’s co-authors.
To figure out the stencils’ ages, researchers used a technique called laser-ablation uranium-series dating, which allows for the accurate dating of ocher-based rock art. The method uses a laser to collect and analyze a tiny amount of mineral crusts that had formed on top of the art.
The study also explored how and when Australia first became settled, with the researchers saying the stencil was most likely created by the ancestors of indigenous Australians.
