Russia has been barred from participating in the Eurovision Song Contest due to their invasion of Ukraine.

Reuters reports that Russia will be excluded from competing in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest final, the organiser said on Friday (February 25), after calls from Ukraine and many other European public broadcasters.

“The decision reflects concern that, in light of Ukraine’s exceptional situation, including a Russian participation in this year’s competition would bring the competition into shame,” the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) said in a statement.

Finland stated on Friday that if Russia was permitted to compete, it would not send any participants to the final. Ukraine, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Lithuania, and Norway have all pushed the EBU to remove Russia.

Russian armed forces launched an invasion of neighbouring Ukraine on Thursday (February 24), leading Western nations to impose economic penalties as well as the cancellation of key international sporting events in Russia.

On May 14, the Eurovision final, one of the world’s most broadcast spectacles, will take place in Turin, Italy.

Russia, which did not enter a participant this year, has competed 23 times since its debut participation in 1994, winning the competition in 2008.

Mykola Chernotytsky, the head of Ukraine’s public broadcasting corporation Suspilne, wrote to the EBU, claiming that “Russia’s participation in this year’s Eurovision, as an aggressor and breaker of international law, undermines the whole spirit of the competition.”

He described Russia’s national broadcaster as a “key component of the Russian government’s media assault against Ukraine.”

In 2016, Crimean Tatar Susana Jamaladinova of Ukraine, known as Jamala, surprisingly won the competition with a song on Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s deportation of hundreds of thousands of people from her Black Sea country, two years after Russia claimed the peninsula.

The next year, as the host of the finals, Ukraine prevented Russia from competing.