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A group of 35 countries, including Australia, the United States and Germany, will demand Russian and Belarusian athletes are banned from the 2024 Olympics, according to the Lithuanian sports minister.
The move deepens the uncertainty over the Paris Games, cranking up the pressure on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) who are desperate to avoid what is arguably the world’s biggest sporting event being torn asunder by the bloody conflict unfolding in Ukraine.
“We are going in the direction that we would not need a boycott because all countries are unanimous,” Jurgita Siugzdiniene said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy took part in the online meeting attended by 35 ministers to discuss the call for the ban, pointing out 228 Ukrainian athletes and coaches died as a result of the Russian aggression.
“If there’s an Olympics sport with killings and missile strikes, you know which national team would take the first place,” he told the ministers.
“Terror and Olympism are two opposites – they cannot be combined.”
British sports minister Lucy Frazer said on Twitter that the meeting was very productive.
“I made the UK’s position very clear: As long as Putin continues his barbaric war, Russia and Belarus must not be represented at the Olympics,” she wrote.
Lee Satterfield, Assistant Secretary of State who leads the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, also participated in the meeting.
“The Assistant Secretary outlined that the United States will continue to join a vast community of nations in our unwavering support for the people of Ukraine and hold the Russian Federation accountable for its brutal and barbaric war against Ukraine, as well as the complicit Lukashenka regime in Belarus,” a spokesperson said.
With war raging in Ukraine, the Baltic States, Nordic countries and Poland had called on international sport to ban Russian and Belarusian athletes from competing in the Olympics.
Ukraine has threatened to boycott the Games if Russian and Belarusian athletes compete. Such threats have revived memories of boycotts in the 1970s and 1980s during the Cold War era that still haunt the global Olympic body today, and it has called on Ukraine to drop them.
However, Polish Sports Minister Kamil Bortniczuk said a boycott was not on the table for now.
“It’s not time to talk about a boycott yet,” he told a news conference, saying there were other ways of putting pressure on the IOC that could be explored first.
He said creating a team of refugees that would include Russian and Belarusian dissidents could be a compromise solution.
The IOC has opened the door for Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete as neutrals. It has said a boycott will violate the Olympic Charter and that its inclusion of Russians and Belarusians is based on a UN resolution against discrimination within the Olympic movement.
Some 18 months before the competition is due to start, the IOC is desperate to calm the waters so as not to imperil the games’ message of global peace and deliver a huge hit to income. While Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of host city Paris, has said Russian athletes should not take part, Paris 2024 organisers have said they will abide by the IOC’s decision on the issue.
The Russian sports ministry did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
© AAP