The Winter Olympics began yesterday in Italy, without Russian teams and with very limited participation by individual Russian athletes competing as “neutrals.” The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is continuing a ban imposed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and has ordered additional testing of athletes in those sports whose federations have allowed Russians to compete as “individual neutral athletes.” The IOC also suspended the Russian Olympic Committee in 2023 for its violent takeover of Ukrainian sports organizations in four Ukrainian regions illegally annexed by the Kremlin.
The Russian leadership has strongly condemned the ban. The Russian Olympic Committee said the 2022 decision “violates the fundamental principles of Olympism,” while Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova compared Russia’s exclusion from the 2024 Paris Olympics to “neo-Nazism.” The Russian athletes most accessible to Western media, the hockey players who play in the National Hockey League (NHL), have lamented losing the opportunity to compete for national glory on the world’s biggest stage.
The appeals of Russian athletes may sound sympathetic to Western sports fans. But Putin’s regime uses every Russian sporting success as propaganda to legitimize its rule. The Kremlin has long viewed sporting success as a national political resource, which explains its history of using intelligence services to facilitate systemic doping, attack those who expose it, and undermine the reputation of its competitors.
Russia has repeatedly used successful athletes to legitimize its full-scale war against Ukraine. At a pro-war rally in March 2022, organized to mark the anniversary of the annexation of Crimea, Russian President Vladimir Putin brought out a number of athletes to serve as mascots for his new campaign of aggression. Some athletes are even more eager to embrace their role as propaganda weapons, such as Veronika Stepanova, the 2022 gold medalist in cross-country skiing. Standing next to Putin at a Kremlin ceremony in April of that year honoring Olympic champions, she said: “Before my eyes, Russia has become strong, proud and successful again. Not everyone in the world likes this… but we are on the right path and we will definitely win, just as we won at the Olympics. Thank you very much for raising the flag of our country high. And we will not lower it, I promise.”
Hockey provides another recent example of how Russia is using its athletes to bolster its war effort and Putin’s regime. Last April, Alexander Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals broke the NHL’s all-time scoring record. In his postgame remarks, the Moscow-born hockey star declared, “All you fans, all the world, Russia—we did it, guys! This is history.” His triumph earned him congratulations from Russian officials, including Putin himself, but two reactions from within the government apparatus stood out.
State Duma deputy Andrei Alshevsky declared: “Despite sanctions, despite discrimination, despite everything, the Russians are winning. No one will stop us.” Even more striking praise came from the Russian Minister of Sports and President of the Russian Olympic Committee, Mikhail Degtyarev, who said: “In an era when world sport has become an arena for political confrontation, the great Russian hockey player has once again proven that a true champion will break through any barrier. … Ovechkin has never hidden or been ashamed of his passport, remains a member of Putin’s team and, at the same time, one of the main faces of world hockey, a favorite of millions and the best scorer in the history of the NHL.” Both officials are outspoken supporters of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Ovechkin himself has been less explicit about his country’s aggression against Ukraine. At the start of the full-scale invasion, he issued a general call for “no more war.” However, at the start of Russia’s hybrid aggression against Ukraine in 2014, he posed for a photo with the message “save children from fascism,” and was the nominal founder of the “Putin Team” project, which campaigned for Putin’s reelection in 2018.
Some Russian athletes have nevertheless spoken out against the political misuse of their fame. In April 2022, world figure skating champion Elizaveta Tuktamysheva agreed to participate in a skating event organized by her fellow world champion and later Putin’s official political representative, Evgeni Plushenko. She was outraged when the event, held in the city of Tula, turned out to be an open celebration of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. “I really wanted to believe that sport is outside of politics, but today it turned out that this is not the case. … I do not want athletes’ performances to become a means of manipulation and persuasion,” Tuktamysheva later wrote on Instagram.
Alexandra Boykova, the European pair skating champion, also suggested that her participation was used against her will for political purposes. However, neither Boykova nor Tuktamysheva openly condemned the pro-war message of the event. Using athletes as pro-war mascots is a common practice in Russia, but the event in Tula shows that the Kremlin will appropriate the sporting achievements of its athletes as weapons in a war against Ukraine, regardless of their consent.
The Kremlin's instrumentalization of sporting successes and appropriation of Ukrainian sports come on top of the enormous damage that Russian aggression has caused to Ukrainian sports and the horrors to which Ukrainian athletes have been subjected. According to the "Angels of Sport" project, Russia has killed at least 516 Ukrainian coaches and athletes - a number that is said to be far from final.
Speaking about the partial lifting of the ban on Russian athletes at the Russian Sports Summit in November 2025, Degtyarev said that “the victories of our athletes are our most important diplomacy.” Indeed, according to activists, many Russians who were allowed by the IOC to compete as neutral athletes remain integrated into state structures and propaganda apparatuses. The world sports establishment should take Degtyarev literally and acknowledge that Russian athletes remain geopolitical instruments.
Russia is not the only country in recent Olympic history to invade another country or use sporting success for political gain. Hockey fans may also lament that this year’s men’s tournament will be weakened without Russian participation, now that NHL stars are returning to the Olympic ice. But Russia has used its military to hijack Ukrainian sport, along with the seizure of Ukrainian people and territory, and the Kremlin is instrumentalizing the sporting successes of its athletes to legitimize aggression against Ukraine. These are offenses that international sport cannot tolerate, and the IOC is right to severely punish them.
The second fundamental principle of the Olympic Charter states that “the aim of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humanity, with the aim of promoting a peaceful society dedicated to the preservation of human dignity.” The use of athletes as a political tool to promote a war of aggression (which Russia shows no sign of stopping), together with the destruction and armed plunder of Ukrainian sport, constitutes an intolerable desecration of that principle.
This means that Russia's exclusion from the Milan Games was the only acceptable decision, and that FIFA President Gianni Infantino's call for Russia to return to international football is completely inappropriate. Instead, Putin's attempts to bring the country back into international sport should be rejected - both at the Olympics and in sports federations around the world - to prevent Russia from using peaceful sports as a weapon in its war against Ukraine.
The text is taken from Foreign Policy.
Translation: NB
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