Participants of the Eurovision selection did not return to Ukraine from abroad – blogger

Participants of Ukraine’s national selection for Eurovision, members of the Poltava-based pop group MBreeze—Oleksandr and Illia Beliakov—as well as singer Vasyl Demchuk (DEMCHUK), have reportedly left Ukraine and not returned.

This information was shared by music journalist Roman Buturlakin on his Telegram channel.

“Recently, someone from the show business industry mentioned this in a private conversation, and I got curious. I checked their Instagram accounts, looked at their posts, and found the last time it was clearly visible that they were in Ukraine. After that, there’s a post about a charity concert abroad, followed by uncertainty—every subsequent post is structured in a way that makes it impossible to determine their exact location,” Buturlakin noted.

According to Buturlakin, Demchuk is currently in Italy, where he is working as a model.

“The case with Vasyl Demchuk is more intriguing. He had a promising start in Ukraine as an artist, but now he openly admits that he is working as a model in Rome. Of course, he doesn’t explain how he got there. However, he was definitely in Kyiv during the full-scale invasion—I saw him many times at various events,” the journalist wrote.

MBreeze were finalists in the 7th season of X-Factor Ukraine and participated in the national Eurovision selection in 2018, reaching the semifinals. Demchuk also competed in Ukraine’s Eurovision selection in 2023.

Since March 3, Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture has suspended the issuance of exit permits for artists and journaliststraveling abroad.

Recently, media reports also surfaced about Oleh Avdysh, the deputy general director of the Lviv football club “Karpaty”, who did not return to Ukraine from an overseas trip. He had traveled with the team for training camps in Turkey.