Protests against the decision of Ukrainian president Yanukovych to scrap a planned economic treaty with the European Union under pressure from Vladimir Putin’s Russia continue to grow. One reason may be support from Ruslana, a national pop star who won the 2004 Eurovision song contest and was the first artist coming out of the former Soviet Union to receive a platinum disc. Her Eurovision performance of “Wild Horses,” complete with whip, skimpy leather outfit and flaming torches, remains distinctive and is frequently voted the best Eurovision performance to date.

The London Times reports that Ruslana has lent not only her celebrity to the protesters but her hands and heart. She has been a constant presence at the protests wearing biker boots, black jeans, a fleece, and a large white fur hat with earflaps.

She said she had been up all night helping to build the barricades around Independence Square (in Kiev). At one point, she used her Mercedes to block an entrance point to protect protesters. . . . Two nights earlier, she helped to escort terrified students, bloodied by riot police who had chased them from the square, to sanctuary. One of them, who had a bad head wound, she took to hospital. . . . “Now our authorities are behaving like mafia. Only bandits threaten their own people.”

Ruslana was briefly a member of parliament under the government of former president Victor Yushchenko, who aided the 2004 Orange Revolution protests against Yanukovych’s fraudulent reelection in that year. But she has no plans to have a political career. “I hate politics,” she told the Times. “It’s the dirtiest thing in life.”

Ruslana, along with Bono of the group U2, is the exception to the rule that celebrities rarely improve an unstable political situation.