These results are not remotely surprising to anyone. It's been long known that closely related countries tend to vote for each other.

And it's not really a matter of people doing bad things, it's simply the general public voting for what they like. It doesn't have to be political at all; maybe people just tend to like songs that are culturally close them.

Look at the graph: Ukraine and Russia vote for each other a lot, despite their political friction.

The other thing is that the "general public" isn't a homogenous bloc.

Political friction might make some members of the 2 million strong ethnic Ukrainian diaspora in Russia more inclined to make gestures of support for Ukraine in television song contests, for example. That public vote from within Russia doesn't get cancelled out if a much larger segment of the Russian public finds songs alluding to Stalinist annexation of the Crimea and repression of the Crimean Tartars actively objectionable.

>And it's not really a matter of people doing bad things, it's simply the general public voting for what they like. It doesn't have to be political at all; maybe people just tend to like songs that are culturally close them.

Voting isn't just by popular vote, though.

Each country has a jury which allocates half of the votes and the other half are allocated based on televoting.

I'm from one of those countries in the list. It has been known that this is the case and that countries vote for neighbors ever since I've first watched Eurovision (in like 2007). I'm really surprised that this isn't common knowledge outside of the circle.