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The Paris Olympics must not be complicit in the war against Ukraine

24 February 2024

OP-ED - LE MONDE

Pour l'Ukraine is carrying a collective opinion piece published in Le Monde, co-signed by 27 personalities.

The Paris Games must not be complicit in the war against Ukraine!

February 23, 2024
6-minute read

Last updated: June 26, 2024

Opinion piece published in Le Monde on March 10, 2024, under the title " The Paris 2024 Games must not be the propaganda arena for Putin's gladiators "

Vladimir Putin, aided by the Belarusian, Chinese, Iranian and North Korean dictatorships, has been waging a war of aggression against Ukraine for two years as part of a broader plan to destabilize Western liberal democracies.

Forced annexations and Russification, mass bombings of civilians, deportations of children, rapes and summary executions, and other war crimes, environmental crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by Russian soldiers and Kremlin-backed mercenaries constitute a grave threat on Europe's doorstep.

However, like previous Russian military aggressions – the occupation of part of Georgia in 2008 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014 – the Russian war against Ukraine is part of the globalized staging of the Olympic Games, now those of Paris 2024. It relies on the organic collaborative links of Russia and China with the International Olympic Committee (IOC), its president Thomas Bach in particular.

It was during the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Games that Xi Jinping and Putin unveiled their plan to inaugurate "a new era of international affairs" to achieve "genuine democracy in a post-Western world." One hundred and fifty thousand Russian soldiers, supported by columns of armored vehicles, were then massed on the Ukrainian border.

Intensely prepared, while international opinion was being distracted by the skiing champions in the world's largest dictatorship, the war against Ukraine was finally triggered on February 24, 2022, shortly after the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games, but just before the start of the Paralympic Games.

The IOC is concerned about its revenue

At the time of the Paralympic medal count, the Russian military and its auxiliaries had committed mass atrocities, using ballistic missiles, cluster bombs, and other large-area explosive weapons against Ukrainian civilians. The Olympic spectacle, orchestrated by the military-police apparatus of the Chinese party-state, was still putting on a show and cynically celebrating "Olympic peace" while Russia and Belarus broke the "Olympic truce," trampled for the umpteenth time on the fallacious principles of the Olympic Charter, and openly violated international law.

The International Paralympic Committee (IPC) reacted swiftly and decisively to these violations, sending athletes from the two offending countries home from Beijing. However, Thomas Bach, the Games' organizer since 2013, merely recommended on February 28th that international federations exclude these countries from their competitions.

Had he himself respected Olympic principles, he would not have provided Putin and Xi Jinping's totalitarian regime with the sporting distractions and propaganda tools they needed. He should have responded solemnly to Russia's threats to invade Ukraine even before the start of the Beijing Games. With Ukraine subsequently engulfed in violence and Europe threatened with nuclear strikes, the IOC seemed primarily concerned with increasing its revenue…

The IPC and the IOC have authorized Russian and Belarusian athletes, as well as their support staff, to participate in the Paris Games under a so-called "neutral banner" , with the approval of the French Minister of Sports and the Olympic and Paralympic Games, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, the President of the Paris Olympic Games Organising Committee, Tony Estanguet, and the President of the French National Olympic and Sports Committee, David Lappartient.

Following this scandalous and opportunistic decision, former Ukrainian sports minister Matvi Bidny posed the crucial question: “Neutrality at a time when Europe is facing the bloodiest war since World War II, and when one nation is trying to destroy another, is tantamount to irresponsibility and complicity with murderers. Russia is the only state that has violated the Olympic truce three times. Russia is the only state that organizes competitions that compete with the Olympic Games. Russia is the only state that threatens to come to the Olympic Games with tanks. What more must Russia do, who else must it kill, before the IOC stops looking favorably upon this terrorist country?”

Mafia system

No one can ignore the fact that the Russian and Belarusian athletes who will parade on the "Olympic Seine" and compete in French Olympic facilities are completely subservient to Putin's mafia-like system. Military personnel, police officers, intelligence agents, and members of clubs controlled by the Russian and Belarusian intelligence services (FSB, GRU, KGB) or by oligarchies associated with the Kremlin are under the control of the entire apparatus responsible for selecting, preparing, and conditioning the sporting elite physically and ideologically. They act at all times and in all places as ambassadors of Putin's will to power.

This is why the Russian and Belarusian Olympic athletes whom the IOC intends to pass off as "neutral individual athletes" will continue to perpetuate in the stadiums the war that is ravaging Kharkiv, Mariupol, Bakhmut, Lviv or Kiev.

Mykhailo Podoliak, advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is quite clear-sighted on this point: "Allowing Russian participation in the Paralympic Games (...) firstly, prolongs the war and, secondly, encourages Russia to increase levels of mass violence in Ukraine." The intensity of Russian bombings of civilian targets, public buildings, and economic facilities does not contradict this.

It is therefore entirely possible that the "humanist and inclusive" Paris Games will be boycotted by a martyred country, deprived of many athletes who have been requisitioned, killed on the front or seriously mutilated, which refuses to endorse the imposture of "Olympic peace" symbolized by the presence of the thugs and legionnaires of Putin and Lukashenko [the Belarusian president] .

Influence strategy

The main security challenge of the Paris Games, beyond the potential threats of attacks, particularly Islamist ones, is therefore imperative to protect Ukraine, and through it France and the whole of democratic Europe, from Putin's destructive agenda. Russian and Belarusian athletes are indeed a major component of the Kremlin's influence strategy.

At a time when Putin's threats against the United States, the European Union and Western solidarity with Ukraine are multiplying, and when he is crushing any form of internal opposition ever more cruelly, as the liquidation of Alexei Navalny in a penal colony has just demonstrated once again, the Paris Games, which claim to celebrate the ideal of "peace and friendship between peoples" , must not be the propaganda arena for Putin's gladiators.

The moral responsibility of the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, and the nation's elected representatives is directly engaged. In the name of France's political sovereignty and dignity, and because we refuse to allow Olympism to serve as an alibi to intensify the war against Ukraine, which should henceforth be part of Europe, we call upon them to refuse to welcome the sporting mercenaries of Putin, Lukashenko, and their co-belligerent allies.

Otherwise, the Paris Games would disgrace themselves by offering a scandalous platform to totalitarian regimes. And the IOC would once again demonstrate its shameful complicity with them, as was already the case at the Berlin Games in 1936, Moscow in 1980, Beijing in 2008 and 2022, and Sochi in 2014.