IOC bans Russian Olympic Committee for including annexed Ukraine territories

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Russia has been suspended by the Olympic authorities with immediate effect after it tried to include four regions in eastern Ukraine under its sporting jurisdiction.

The land grab in sports administration saw Russia’s Olympic officials announce last week that they were accepting the local sports councils of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia as new members.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced Russia’s suspension saying the move by the Russian Olympic Committee was a breach of the Olympic Charter, a set of rules and principles for international sports bodies.

The suspension will not have any immediate effect on Russians who are in line to compete at international events as neutral athletes, such as in qualifying stages for next year’s Paris Olympics.

“[Russia’s] unilateral decision,” the International Olympic Committee said in a statement from Mumbai, India, “constitutes a breach of the Olympic Charter because it violates the territorial integrity of the NOC of Ukraine, as recognized by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in accordance with the Olympic Charter.”

The IOC didn’t suspend the Russian Olympic body for a similar move in 2016, more than two years after the annexation of the Crimean peninsula. Russian media reported in December 2016 that the sports councils of Crimea and Sevastopol were included as ROC members. International law still recognizes the region as part of Ukraine.

Still, the decision Thursday to suspend the ROC appears to highlight rising frustration from the IOC and its president, Thomas Bach, who can ultimately decide to impose a blanket ban on all Russian athletes from Paris.

“(The IOC) reserves the right to decide about the participation of individual neutral athletes with a Russian passport in the Olympic Games Paris 2024 and the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026 at the appropriate time,” the IOC said.

The Russian Olympic Committee criticized the IOC for “another counterproductive decision with obvious political motivations.

”However, the IOC under Mr Bach has often been seen as too sympathetic to Russia during a decade-long doping scandal by never excluding all the country’s athletes and teams from any Olympics despite proven allegations of state-backed cheating and tampering with evidence.

The latest decision by the IOC board comes seven months after it publicly supported Russian athletes by advising governing bodies of Olympic sports to find ways of including them in qualifying events for the Paris Games.

That IOC policy to ease a blanket ban was in defiance of calls from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and many Ukrainian athletes to maintain the exclusion of athletes from Russia and Belarus.

Instead, each Olympic sport was asked to evaluate if individual athletes had not actively supported the war and were not contracted to the military or state security agents. The centralised approach has led to apparently inconsistent results, such as wrestling approving Olympic gold medalists who appeared on stage at a pro-war rally in Moscow.

Those vetting processes by different sports will continue despite the IOC suspension imposed Thursday, which does not affect Belarus.

“The suspension of the national Olympic committee doesn’t affect in any way the participation of independent athletes,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams said at a news conference after the board meeting.

Mr Adams said the Russian Olympic Committee had been informed of its suspension before the IOC announced it publicly.

Russia remains excluded from international events in team sports, despite a short-lived and failed attempt this month by European soccer body UEFA to put Russian under-17 teams into qualifying groups for their European Championship.

The new ban removes the right of the ROC to get funding from the Switzerland-based IOC, which is worth millions of dollars in each four-year Olympic funding cycle. Russian officials reportedly have been weighing legal action to access the money that was not being paid during the war.

The Russian Olympic Committee could challenge the IOC decision at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland.

“ROC, as a participant in the international sports movement, reserves the right to protect its own interests, as well as the interests of athletes and organizations of a sovereign country, which we represent in good faith,” the Russian Olympic body said.

The IOC had refrained from sanctioning the Russian or Belarusian Olympic Committee since Moscow’s 2022 invasion. But it had imposed a ban on athletes from those countries in the first few months of the invasion.

In a significant development in March, the IOC issued the first set of recommendations to international sports federations. These recommendations allowed Russian and Belarusian athletes to participate once more, competing as individual athletes without displaying a national flag, emblem, or anthem.

Additional reporting by agencies