Sportwashing Russia

Among the broad range of international sanctions imposed on Russia four years ago to discourage it from further aggression in Ukraine was a measure that had been applied only once in past – against apartheid South Africa. Many international organizations excluded Russia from major cultural and sporting events, including international football associations. Given the magnitude of the interests involved, this was no empty gesture.

Commenting on the decision, Francesco Siccardi of the Carnegie Foundation wrote that: ‘Beyond the shiny international events, the billion-dollar investments, and the lucrative sponsorships, football remains the world’s most popular sport, and a formidable tool of soft power. In being cut out of the international football system, Russia has lost a powerful microphone … it is the ban from football that could hurt the Russian regime’s soft power the most’.

Siccardi was certainly right, though probably too optimistic in his assumption that we were witnessing ‘the dawn of a new era of ethics in sports’, and that sports ‘might be the latest front line in the confrontation between democracies and authoritarian regimes’.

After a year-and-a-half, the sporting sanctions began to crack – not only in the Global South, where they were never actually implemented, but also in the heart of the western world, where too many actors have appeared increasingly eager to benefit from the rule-breaking. Temptation was strong, and so too was the pressure on international bodies to relax the sanctions, to make exceptions, and to turn a blind eye to some if not all transgressions.

Bogus neutrality

At the end of 2023, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) allowed Russian athletes to return to individual competitions, provided they would participate under a neutral flag. Ukrainians adamantly condemned the ‘shameful decision, which undermines Olympic principles’ and ‘essentially gives Russia the green light to weaponize the Olympics, because the Kremlin will use every Russian athlete as a weapon in its propaganda warfare’.

The IOC, predictably, ignored the warnings as ‘too emotional’. ‘Neutrality’ enabled Russian athletes to participate in the Summer Olympics in Paris in 2024 and in the Winter Olympics in Milan in 2026. It became a fig leaf that allowed the IOC and numerous sport federations to greenlight very dubious personages from Russia. Athletes like figure skater Petr Gumennik, who infamously performed a military-themed routine in an ice show in 2024, wearing a soldier’s uniform, or Adelia Petrosyan, another figure skater, who collected aid for Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine at the Summer in Moscow festival last year.

The fact that numerous Russian athletes are members of the military or military sport clubs does not preclude their participation in the international events under the ‘neutral’ flag. According to Ukrainian journalists, 45 out of 71 medals Russia received at the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics were won by members of the Central Sports Club of the Russian Army; two years later, competing under an ostensibly ‘neutral’ flag at the Winter Olympics in Beijing, they won 14 out of 32 medals.

The case of the Russian ice hockey player Alexander Ovechkin, who plays in the USA and who last year broke the National Hockey League’s all-time goal-scoring record, graphically demonstrated that ‘neutral’ status does not prevent the fame and achievements of Russian athletes from being brazenly appropriated. Ovechkin’s (or anybody else’s) alleged ‘neutrality’ does not matter to Putin’s propagandists in the slightest; what they care about Russian glory, victory and dominance.

‘Despite the sanctions, despite the discrimination, despite everything, Russians are winning. No one will stop us’, declared one of them. ‘In an era when world sports have become an arena for political confrontation, a great Russian hockey player once again proved that a true champion will break through any barriers’, boasted another. ‘Ovechkin has never hidden or been embarrassed by his passport, remains a member of the Putin team, and, at the same time, one of the main faces of world hockey, a favourite of millions, and the top scorer in the NHL.’

While Ovechkin made a generic call for ‘no more war’ at the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion, and so could technically be considered ‘neutral’, he has never criticized Putin’s ‘team’, nor spoken out against the political (mis)use of his fame. The case exemplifies how easily ‘neutrality’ can be ignored by the regimes supposedly being sanctioned – unless, of course, the athlete makes a clear statement on the issue.

Follow the money

At the end of last year, the IOC took another step towards legitimizing the Russian war in Ukraine, passing the decision not only to bring Russian juniors back into the international scene but to allow them to use their national flag. Several international federations – chess, volleyball, fencing, equestrianism – immediately jumped at this potentially profitable opportunity. Judo and Sambo went even further and decided to allow not only juniors but all Russian athletes to compete with their flag and anthem.

Lobbying strongly for the decision of the IOC were the bosses of FIFA and UEFA, who apparently saw this concession to Moscow as another step to full-fledged reestablishment of Russian participants in international football. FIFA president Gianni Infantino expressed this idea on the record at the UEFA congress in Belgrade last year. The event was also marred by the failure of the renowned and reputable Ukrainian former footballer Andriy Shevchenko to win election to the UEFA executive board, causing Ukraine to lose its seat. Shevchenko was apparently seen as a potential troublemaker. The Serbian hosts added insult to injury by including in the traditional minute of silence a Russian player and convicted drug dealer who had volunteered to fight in Ukraine, where he had found his end. A minor incident, perhaps, but symbolically important.

In an interview with British Sky Sports, Infantino reaffirmed his position that FIFA’s ban on Russia ‘has achieved nothing, it has only created more frustration and hatred’. Allowing boys and girls from Russia to play football in Europe ‘could help’, he added. The statement sparked outrage in Ukraine. Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha did not mince words on X: ‘679 Ukrainian girls and boys will never be able to play football – Russia killed them. And it keeps killing more while moral degenerates suggest lifting bans, despite Russia’s failure to end its war. Future generations will view this as a shame reminiscent of the 1936 Olympics.’

Infantino – who we should recall promoted the highly dubious world cup in Qatar, cynically downplaying information about the Qataris’ inhumane treatment of migrant workers – was an ardent defender of Russia hosting the 2018 World Cup, four years after the annexation of Crimea and invasion of Donbas. He was rewarded with the Order of Friendship from Vladimir Putin and still tries to prove he deserves it.

His recent bromance with Trump is equally repellent. In November last year, Infantino announced that FIFA had established its own Peace Prize. A few weeks later, the football star Cristiano Ronaldo joined Trump for a state dinner with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – ‘the poster boy for sportswashing alongside two global icons of corruption and authoritarianism’, as Graham Cornwell of Foreign Policy described the trio. The FIFA Peace Prize predictably went to Trump; a few days later, perhaps also predictably, US prosecutors dropped charges in a criminal case linked to FIFA’s 2015 corruption affair.

Poor Russian children

The UEFA president, Aleksander Čeferin, is not as active and outspoken, and does not push so hard for Russia’s sporting rehabilitation – perhaps because, unlike Infantino, he cannot rely on the support of the Global South. So far, the Slovenian functionary has spoken only about Russian children who ‘are not allowed to meet children from the other parts of the world’ and ‘are raised in fear and hatred’. The solution, in his view, is simple: ‘If they would come to play in Slovenia, I’m sure Slovenian children would hug them and speak to them … They would understand that we are not their enemies, that nations are not enemies between each other. But politicians, they don’t care about that.’

Ukrainians will smile bitterly at this infantile reasoning. Because for decades, there were no restrictions on Russian children coming to Ukraine, playing football and doing whatever else. Many of them used to have friends, if not relatives in Ukraine; Ukrainians hugged them and spoke their language. Even after the annexation of Crimea and invasion of Donbas, the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians retained a positive attitude towards Russians, sticking to a naive belief in good people under a bad government.

The thousands, probably millions of Russian children who happened to visit Ukraine had a good chance to learn and tell their friends at home that nobody hated them there, that Ukrainians were not enemies. But the children grew up and a few years later returned – to kill, to rape, to destroy, to wipe the Ukrainian nation from the face of earth. Within a few years, the Putinist propaganda had brainwashed them. It was certainly not Ukrainians or westerners who raised them ‘in fear and hatred’, as Čeferin seems to believe.

Like all sportocrats, the UEFA boss uses politically correct language about peace, human rights and, of course, poor children made to suffer by unspecified villains, who are never named but put conveniently into a generic box labelled ‘reckless politicians’. Čeferin assures us that ‘we don’t interfere in politics’, but agrees that ‘it’s terrible that children are dying because of political interest’. What is missing in these nice words is an understanding that politicians and their ‘interests’ are very specific and should be named. Instead, the UEFA president believes, or pretends to believe, in a pristine realm of sport, unspoiled by ‘politics’, where he is entitled to be a custodian.

Čeferin asks rhetorically whether the ban on Russian clubs stopped the war. This is a common mantra among sport officials and is disingenuous. So far, even harsh economic sanctions have not stopped Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. Sport – like culture – plays a symbolic role: it enhances the visibility of a state, improves its international image, encourages patriotism, distracts from less admirable deeds and policies. In short, it provides governments with soft power, alongside the harsh or even hard power that some use, especially during war. Obviously, sanctions in sport cannot stop wars, which are waged by hard power; but they can substantially undermine the capacity of a state to wage war by limiting its means of international propaganda, whitewashing and nationalistic mobilization.

Sportwashing the rogues

Another argument habitually employed by sportocrats to justify their conciliatory policy vis-à-vis rogue regimes is about sport’s alleged autonomy from politics. Even in democracies, this is only partially true. And in autocracies, it is a deliberate, unscrupulous lie. The notion of autonomy underlies what experts call ‘sportwashing’ – the process through which, via the promotion of popular sporting events and the organizational skills proved in the process, regimes distract from their ugly, repressive activities at home and their aggressions abroad.

The essence and ultimate goal of sportwashing is political manipulation. According to Sarath Ganji, it can manifest in three ways: first, sports can ‘displace negative content by elevating alternative stories. This form of manipulation resembles a smoke screen, a haze of emergent stories capitalizing on competing news values to cloud coverage of other events.’ Second, sports can ‘discredit negative content by amplifying alternate perspectives’. Third, ‘sports can debase negative content by arousing alternate emotions’, something that Emile Durkheim defined as ‘collective effervescence’ – a feeling familiar to anybody who has attended sporting events or other mass gatherings.

Russia, like China, Qatar, Emirates, Saudi Arabia and other autocracies, is actively engaged in sportwashing. But Russia is the only one also engaged in a brutal war of aggression. This ‘peculiarity’ makes its sportwashing activity particularly sinister and dangerous. Like everything else in today’s Russia – culture, religion, trade, history, education – sport is weaponized. Russian officials have an openly instrumental, crudely militaristic approach to sport that does not fit nicely with the IOC’s script about ‘sport beyond politics’. Nor do they buy the fairy tale about ‘neutrality’. On the contrary, they consistently use successful athletes to legitimize the full-scale war against Ukraine, using them as mascots at mass events in support of Putin’s aggression and internationally to promote the ‘human face’ of the rogue state.

Most athletes either agree to this tacitly or enthusiastically join the ranks of Kremlin propagandists. In April 2022, two months into Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, the cross-country skier Veronika Stepanova delivered an ultra-patriotic speech at a ceremony in the Kremlin honouring Russian medallists from Winter Olympics in Beijing. ‘Before our eyes,’ she said on behalf of her fellow-athletes, ‘Russia has once again become strong, proud and successful. Obviously, not everyone in the world likes this, but I’m sure we will win, as we did at the Games.’ Rather than muse on sport’s ‘neutrality’, then, one should take more seriously the recent statement of Mikhail Degtyarev, the head of the Russian Olympic committee: ‘The victories of our athletes [are] our most important diplomacy’. He means it.

This was a direct response to the (former) IOC President Thomas Bach, who in March 2023 rebuffed the decision of most European countries to suspend Russia from participation in international sport events: ‘If politics decides who can take part in a competition, then sport and athletes become tools of politics’. Moscow proves the opposite: if decent politics does not decide who can take part in a competition, then sport and athletes become tools of the dirty politics of the ugliest dictatorships.

Uphill struggle

The latest decision of the International Paralympic Committee to allow Russians and Belarusians to compete in Milan under their national flags and with national anthems reveals the general tendency: the international sportocrats would like to ease and ultimately lift the sanctions on Russian athletes, Russian officials and, of course, Russian money. It does not matter for them that Russia has not changed its behaviour but, on the contrary, escalated the daily terror and bloodshed in Ukraine. The IOC officials repeat the same mantra: ‘Individual athletes cannot be punished for the acts of their governments.’

But how are they being ‘punished’, exactly? Are they being murdered, like their 600+ Ukrainian fellow-athletes? Or being exiled from their ruined country and occupied territories, like millions of other Ukrainians? Are they being dispossessed of their sport-halls, stadiums, swimming pools, denied even the possibility of regular training without bombings and air alarms? No, they are merely asked not to support, directly or indirectly, the genocidal war that their government wages in Ukraine. They are called on merely not to sportwash their rulers and their policies, not to enhance their symbolic power, not contribute to the criminal cause with the personal fame.

As long as Russian athletes do not support their government’s genocidal war in Ukraine, they are not responsible. But as Russian citizens, they are accountable for everything their country does. All of them have a choice, all of them can find a way to distance themselves from the criminal deeds of their government.

When the Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych ran in Cortina d’Ampezzo wearing a helmet with 22 small portraits of his colleagues killed by Russians in the past few years, he was disqualified because of ‘noncompliance with the rules’. There was no text on the helmet, no explanation who the depicted people were, but the IOC deemed it ‘political propaganda’. They intuited that the athlete was not just commemorating deceased colleagues but also protesting – against the IOC’s greed, cynicism, double standards and appeasement of Russians.

Heraskevych ran against them and against the general tendency in the IOC’s decisions, its persistent avoidance of names and its persistent attempts to downplay both the scale and uniqueness of the ‘conflict’ (as if the Russian war in Ukraine were a minor family quarrel). ‘This is one among 28 wars and conflicts going on this world and all the other athletes are competing peacefully with each other’, lectures one IOC official. ‘There are 130 conflicts going on in the world. We cannot have 130 different conflicts featured, however terrible they are, during the field of play’, adds the other.

‘I believe that I did not break any rules’, Heraskevych said upon his disqualification. ‘I defended the interests of Ukraine, and not so much the country as the memory of these athletes. They deserve it, but unfortunately, the IOC thinks otherwise … Today we paid the price for our dignity.’

Alas, the price has become increasingly high. Ukraine faces an uphill struggle – with the external enemy and domestic problems, but also with the rigidity and corruption of international institutions, the ignorance, selfishness and cynicism of international leaders, and the growing ‘Ukraine fatigue’ within populations who increasingly see Ukraine as a nuisance.

But hope does exist. Ironically, it can be discerned in the words of a major Russia appeaser who complains at the ‘radicals’ that obstruct his smooth return to business as usual: ‘With the war, Russia-Ukraine, we had an almost hysterical political reaction’, said the UEFA president Aleksander Čeferin. ‘Now I don’t see much reaction from politics. From civil society it’s huge.’

That reaction might be Ukraine’s last hope that decency prevails.