For over a decade, Leléka has been building toward a night like this one — an actor trained in Kyiv, a jazz vocalist schooled in Dresden, a composer who co-founded a Berlin folk ensemble and then headlined Glastonbury. On the evening of 7 February 2026, all of it converged: she stood on the Vidbir 2026 stage in Kyiv and performed "Ridnym," and when the votes were counted, she had received the maximum possible score from both the professional jury and the public televote. Ukraine had its representative for the 70th Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna. The song's title — a Ukrainian dative meaning to the dear ones, to the dearest — had chosen itself.

Table of Contents

The Artist — Leléka
The Song — "Ridnym"
The Road to Vienna — Vidbir 2026
Technical and Musical Analysis

The Artist — Leléka

The stage name is Leléka. The passport reads Viktoria Korniikova. Born in Ukraine with German roots that would eventually pull her westward — to Dresden, then to Berlin — she grew up in a country where the line between performer and witness, between artist and citizen, would prove impossible to maintain. Whatever the borders were, Korniikova crossed them: acoustically, linguistically, institutionally, and in terms of sheer artistic ambition, until she had assembled one of the most unusually credentialled biographies in contemporary European folk pop.

Her formal education was not one degree but three. The first was a Bachelor's in Performing Arts and Acting from the Kyiv National I. K. Karpenko-Kary Theatre, Cinema and Television University — one of Ukraine's most prestigious conservatories of dramatic performance, a training environment that treats the deployment of voice as an act of theatrical storytelling rather than mere technical output. That grounding in embodied performance, stage presence, and emotional precision underpins every musical decision she would subsequently make. Then came Germany. At the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber in Dresden, she earned a second Bachelor's in Jazz Vocals, followed by a Master's degree in Composition at the same institution. Three degrees, three disciplines: theatricality, jazz, and musical architecture. The combination is not accidental — it is the blueprint of an artist who understood early that commanding a stage requires tools most performers never think to acquire.

In 2016, Korniikova formed the ensemble that would bear her chosen name: Leléka, a four-person folk jazz band based in Berlin, built alongside Robert Wienröder, Thomas Kolarczyk, and Jakob Hegner. The band's official website — active since 2016 and citing praise from outlets including JazzThing — confirms their identity as a Berlin-rooted Ukrainian folk jazz ensemble. The name itself is quietly significant: лелека (leléka) is Ukrainian for stork — a bird that in Ukrainian folklore represents the homeland, the return to one's native place, and the bond between a person and the earth that raised them. To name your ensemble after a bird that always comes home is to make the first artistic statement before playing a single note. The band won awards, built an audience in Berlin's experimental folk circuit, and produced music that fused the melodic richness of Ukrainian folk traditions with the harmonic sophistication of jazz improvisation.

In 2024, Korniikova launched a parallel solo identity: Donbasgrl, an art-pop and electronic music project that pushed her compositional range into more personal and politically charged territory. The project's name carries geographic weight that requires no gloss for Ukrainian listeners. The momentum it generated was swift: Donbasgrl was selected for Eurosonic Noorderslag (ESNS) in 2025 — the Netherlands-based discovery festival widely regarded as the primary launchpad for European emerging artists onto the international touring circuit — and, in the same year, performed at the Glastonbury Festival in England, one of the most symbolically loaded outdoor performance platforms in global music. That two artistically distinct identities — Leléka (folk, ensemble, roots) and Donbasgrl (solo, electronic, raw) — could both achieve major international milestones within the same twelve-month window is a measure of the creative energy involved. It is Leléka who travels to Vienna — carrying the name that means the one who returns.

The Song — "Ridnym"

"Ridnym" (Рідним) is a dative plural. Not a noun, not a name — a grammatical gesture of dedication. The word means to the dear ones, for those who are ours. In the song's recurring phrase — ridnym, nairidnishym — it becomes a superlative of belonging: to the dearest of the dear. It is an address, a dedication, and a declaration simultaneously. The title alone communicates what competition entry titles rarely attempt: an entire emotional posture in a single inflected Ukrainian word.

"Ridnym" was co-written by Viktoria Leléka, Yaroslav Dzhus, Adama Cefalu, and Jakob Hegner — the last a direct line of continuity from the Berlin folk jazz ensemble, bringing the compositional language of a decade-long musical partnership into the Eurovision entry itself. The lyrical credits belong to Adama Cefalu and Viktoria Leléka, as confirmed in the official songwriting credits published by Suspilne ahead of the final. The song moves between English and Ukrainian with the organic ease of a genuinely bilingual consciousness — the Ukrainian sections carry the emotional and cultural core; the English passages provide conceptual scaffolding for international audiences unfamiliar with the dative case.

The central musical metaphor is drawn from one of the oldest and most resonant symbols in Ukrainian cultural life: vyshivka, the art of embroidery. Vyshiu, vyshiu / Vyshiu novu doliu — I will embroider, I will embroider / I will embroider a new destiny. The Ukrainian tradition of embroidered textiles, and particularly the vyshyvanka (the embroidered shirt, now widely recognised as a symbol of Ukrainian cultural identity), is not mere decoration: it is a record of belonging, a language of symbols, a way of threading the past into the present and wearing it publicly on the body. To embroider a new destiny is to take that most intimate and patient of handicrafts — the needle, the thread, the hours — and apply it to the act of remaking a future. In the context of a Ukraine still living through war, it is an image of extraordinary resonance.

The broader lyrical imagery compounds this: green into rust, red into dust, cut from the branch, leaves in the flames — nothing is safe. Entropy and decay as the precondition for growth. Then the turn: when we oppose our fears and turn all our woes to cheers / I know the roots still carry water / when all the seeds we've sown blossom and lead us home / we'll see the trees grow even taller. The tree — rooted, resilient, growing toward light after burning — becomes the song's dominant symbol in its final movement. What begins in autumn and fire reaches its conclusion in bloom. Musically, the arrangement mirrors this arc: measured and intimate in the verses, expanding into full-voiced conviction in the chorus, with the Ukrainian-language passages functioning as a lyrical heartbeat beneath the English narration.

The Road to Vienna — Vidbir 2026

Ukraine's national selection, Vidbir (Відбір — meaning literally selection), is coordinated by public broadcaster Suspilne (UA:PBC). The official Eurovision broadcaster preview described the 2026 edition as the tenth edition of Vidbir — a milestone for a format that has consistently produced some of the contest's most uncompromising and musically inventive entries. Ten years of Vidbir is ten years of evidence that a broadcaster working under severe constraints can identify and present artists capable of holding their own, and then some, on Eurovision's largest stage.

Vidbir 2026 Final — 7 February 2026, Kyiv

The Vidbir 2026 final was broadcast on Saturday, 7 February 2026, hosted by television presenter Lesia Nikitiuk and Timur Miroshnychenko — the latter already familiar to Eurovision audiences internationally as a co-host of the Kyiv 2017 Eurovision Song Contest. Ten acts competed for the right to represent Ukraine in Vienna, with the winner determined by a 50/50 combination of professional jury and public televote. The five-member jury was assembled with deliberate historical weight: choreographer Kostiantyn Tomilchenko; radio broadcaster Vitaliy Drozdov; musician and composer Yevhen Filatov; Zlata Ognevich, the Ukrainian representative in 2013 who placed third in Malmö; and Ruslana — the artist who first brought Ukraine Eurovision glory in Istanbul in 2004 with "Wild Dances."

Leléka performed sixth in the running order. The competition was strong: Jerry Heil, whose pre-show polling had positioned her as the fan favourite, and LAUD both pushed hard. When the votes were tallied, the result was unambiguous: Leléka had received the maximum possible score from both panels — 10 jury points and 10 public points, a perfect total of 20, with 60,050 public votes behind the public tally. No other act in the field achieved top scores from both panels simultaneously. LAUD finished second with 18 points; Jerry Heil placed third with 16. As the official Suspilne announcement confirmed: Leléka would go to Vienna.

The presence of Ruslana on the jury provided the evening with a poetic through-line that the contest, at its best, excels at creating. Twenty-two years after her own victory launched Ukraine's extraordinary Eurovision chapter, she sat at the professional jury table and cast her vote for the next generation. The 2004 champion; the 2026 kingmaker. Eurovision rewards its own history.

Ukraine's Eurovision Legacy

Ukraine's record at the Eurovision Song Contest is among the most consistently distinguished in the modern era of the competition. Across every edition in which semi-final qualification was required, Ukraine has achieved a perfect 100% Grand Final qualification rate — an unbroken streak of 19 semi-final appearances, each of which produced a qualifier. The national roll call includes milestones that would individually define most countries' entire Eurovision histories: Ruslana's victory in Istanbul 2004 with "Wild Dances"; Jamala's politically charged and vocally extraordinary win in Stockholm 2016 with "1944"; and Kalush Orchestra's triumph in Turin 2022 with "Stefania" — Ukraine's third victory, achieved as the country's full-scale war with Russia entered its second week. Three wins. Triple the historical weight. Against that backdrop, Leléka arrives in Vienna not as a surprise entrant or a rising act being given its chance — she arrives as the latest chapter of something two decades in the making.

She will compete in Semi-Final 2 on Thursday, 14 May 2026, at the Wiener Stadthalle in Vienna, performing in the second half of the show — a draw position historically associated with stronger audience memory at the moment voting windows open.

Technical and Musical Analysis

Vocal Architecture

Leléka's vocal training occupies a rare intersection of disciplines. Her Acting degree from the Kyiv National Karpenko-Kary University trained her in the theatrical deployment of voice — not as sound production alone, but as controlled emotional communication in which breath placement, vowel shaping, and dynamic calibration all serve a narrative purpose, shaping what the listener feels rather than merely what they hear. Her Jazz Vocals Bachelor's from Dresden imposed a different discipline: harmonic awareness, improvisational fluency, and the capacity to locate expressive weight within chord structures that demand it. Her Composition Master's means she hears the architecture of "Ridnym" from the inside — she co-built the construction — and can place her voice within that structure with a precision that belongs to a composer rather than an interpreter.

In "Ridnym," the verse sections require restraint and intimacy — a conversational delivery that trusts the listener's attention, holding back so the release in the chorus carries genuine force. The Ukrainian-language sections, centred on the embroidery motif, call for a different timbre entirely: folk-inflected, rooted, with the specific vowel placement and tonal warmth that Ukrainian phonology demands. Managing these transitions — from English narrative to Ukrainian incantation to full-voiced English resolution — within a three-minute competitive performance is the vocal challenge at the core of this entry. Based on Leléka's demonstrated training and track record, it is a challenge she is architecturally prepared for.

Staging and Visual Potential

The Wiener Stadthalle is an arena-scale venue, built for audiences of tens of thousands and designed for rock concerts and large sporting events. Translating an intimate song built on embroidery metaphors and the whispered Ukrainian word for home into a performance that holds that space is the production challenge at the heart of Ukraine's 2026 entry. For an artist with Leléka's background, it is a familiar kind of problem. Theatrical vocal training is, at its core, the discipline of projecting authentic emotion across distance — of making something feel immediate and personal to someone sitting in the back row. The Green Futures field at Glastonbury is not a small venue. Neither was the Kyiv stage where Vidbir 2026 was filmed. Neither will Vienna be.

Visually, "Ridnym" opens productive creative territory. The vyshyvanka's intricate embroidery patterns, the national colour palette of blue and gold, the tree and root imagery from the song's lyrical world — these offer a staging language that is simultaneously culturally specific and immediately legible to a pan-European broadcast audience encountering it for the first time. The song, in that sense, is already set-dressed. What the production team will determine is the scale and precision of the realisation.

Competitive Context at Eurovision 2026

In a field where Ukrainian entries have arrived at Eurovision carrying the weight of geopolitical attention for several consecutive years, "Ridnym" offers something that stands apart: it is, first and most visibly, a beautifully constructed song. Its themes — belonging, resilience, the roots that carry water even when the branches have burned — are universal because they emerge from a particular, lived, and deeply specific experience. The song does not require its audience to understand the political context in order to feel what it is about. It offers an invitation to recognise something about their own deepest attachments, in Ukrainian and in English, simultaneously.

That dual-language structure is the entry's clearest signal of intent. "Ridnym" was made for an international stage. Its Ukrainian core is not a concession to national selection judges — it is the song's emotional truth, voiced in the language in which that truth was formed. The English passages are bridges, not translations. The two languages co-exist not because rules require them to, but because the artist who wrote this song lives in both, and the song could not be entirely honest in only one.

In the tenth year of Vidbir, on the night that Ruslana cast a jury vote and 60,000 members of the public cast theirs, Ukraine found its next chapter. A maximum score from every panel. A name that means the one who comes home. And a song that will be embroidered live — in front of a Vienna arena and fifty million viewers across Europe — in May 2026. Leléka is going to Vienna. The roots, as the song promises, still carry water.