Quote Originally Posted by hddscan View Post
When two commands get together and compete the logical outcome is that one command might defeat the other one.
Eurovision had 28 contestants from different countries not 2 but somehow only Russia gets defeated. It's simply logical to conclude that it was Russia vs the rest of contestants, according to the author. Now the bigger question is, should Russians feel threatened by those 27 countries (let's not forget all the boos Polina has got) and are those countries hostile toward Russia? That's the message that the Guardian wanted to deliver to the readers and that's no more than propaganda.
By the time Russia was "defeated", every other country except Sweden had already lost the contest. So, it was a rivalry of the two at that point, and obviously, one or another was to have "defeated" the other one.