Anastasia Prikhodko

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Anastasia Prikhodko (born 21 April 1987 in Kyiv) is a Ukrainian singer-songwriter, activist, and former politician. She is known for her deep contralto voice and a mix of folk, rock, and pop music.

Her rise to fame came after winning the Russian TV show Fabrika Zvyozd in 2007, which led to work with producer Konstantin Meladze. In 2009 she represented Russia in the Eurovision Song Contest with the song “Mamo” in Moscow, finishing 11th. The year also brought controversy over Ukraine’s national selection, and she briefly faced questions about the competition’s integrity. After Eurovision, she ended her collaboration with Meladze and later tried to enter Eurovision for Ukraine in 2011 and 2016, reaching the Ukrainian final in 2011 but not the final in 2016.

From 2014 she became politically active in Ukraine, supporting Ukrainian sovereignty during Euromaidan and the War in Donbas. In 2015 she vowed not to perform in Russian anymore, focusing more on Ukrainian-language music. In 2018 she announced her retirement from music to pursue politics, joining Yulia Tymoshenko’s Fatherland party. She ran in the 2019 parliamentary election in Vinnytsia but did not win. By 2021 she said she was no longer interested in politics, continuing her work as a musician and activist.

Education and music: Prikhodko studied folk singing in Kyiv and plays the flute, guitar, and piano. She writes music with others and has released several albums, including Zazhdalas (2012), Ya vilna (2016), and Same toy (2019, fully in Ukrainian). She has also released multiple singles and appeared on The Masked Singer Ukraine in 2021.

Personal life: She is the daughter of a Russian father, Konstantin Rybalov, a miner from Rostov-on-Don, and a Ukrainian mother, Oksana Prikhodko, a theatre critic. The family separated when she was young, and she was raised by her mother. She has an older brother, Nazar, who also works in music, and she has partial Japanese ancestry through a great-grandfather.

Prikhodko has been married twice. Her first husband, Nurik Kukhilava, with whom she has a daughter, separated in 2011 and divorced in 2013. Her second husband, Oleksandr, is the father of two sons (born 2015 and 2021).