Welcome Sir Elton to Kyiv, again
Elton John must like Kyiv. He’s coming to sing here again, and he is doing it for free.
On June 30, the day before the final match of Euro 2012 in Kyiv, the British singer-songwriter legend will be performing in the fan zone of Maidan Nezalezhnosti. He will share the stage with Queen+Adam Lambert.
Olena Pinchuk’s ANTIAIDS Foundation is organizing the event in cooperation with the Union of European Football Associations. The performance is organized as an ant-AIDS benefit, with the slogan: “Your life is not a game! Let’s stop AIDS together.”
Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to attend the concert. Millions will have a chance to watch it live on TV in Ukraine and Poland, according to the foundation’s press statement.
There will be an invitation-only VIP zone. Those who get in there are expected to donate to fighting AIDS, though. Elton John has his own AIDS Foundation.
Born Reginald Kenneth Dwight in 1947, the multiple Grammy winner has visited Ukraine at least four times in recent years.
He came for gala performances in 2007 and 2011, and once for a private performance at former President Leonid Kuchma’s birthday party. Olena Pinchuk, whose foundation invited Sir John this time, is the ex-president’s daughter and the wife of Viktor Pinchuk, one of Ukraine’s richest billionaires.
Apart from joint projects and friendships with the Kuchma-Pinchuk family, Elton John has developed a tie of his own in Ukraine. In 2009 he and his partner, David Furnish, expressed a wish to adopt a Ukrainian child from an orphanage for AIDS-affected children.
Lev, then a 14 months old boy, and his brother had parents who could not take care of them. Yet the Ukrainian authorities rejected the duo’s request for adoption for two reasons: At age 62, Elton John was too old by Ukrainian law to adopt a child.
They may have gone around that obstacle by getting Furnish, then 46, to adopt the child, but Ukrainian law does not recognize same-sex marriages.
“That is a disgrace and I am afraid Ukraine is far behind the rest of the world. Wake up, Ukraine. Wake up to people rights. You are living in the 19th century. Get to the 21st century and start treating gay people as human beings,” Elton John said then.
Nevertheless, he vowed to continue supporting Lev and his brother. He is now funding up to three dozen AIDS-related charity projects in Ukraine, where about 1.6 percent of the population is infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, according to non-government organizations’ estimates.
In his comments to the Independent newspaper last December, Elton John said that the only possible way for Ukraine to stop the disease is to get rid of a stigma in the country against those who are HIV positive and against the gay community in particular.
Elton John’s activities in Ukraine are frowned upon by the local churches and religious groups, who even staged a protest against his arrival in winter 2011. Nevertheless, his arrival causes a excitement among his audience, which has been buzzing excitedly online about the free concert.
His concert in 2007 gathered a crowd of 200,000 people, and is expected to be even more popular this year, when passions are already running high because of the football championship. Coupled with Queen, another all-time favorite band of the Ukrainians, the crowds might get quite scary.
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