When the 2026 Winter Olympic Games kick off in Italy on Feb. 6, there will be no participation from Russian teams and very limited participation from individual Russian athletes competing as “neutrals.” The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is continuing the ban imposed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and has mandated extra screening of athletes in sports whose federations have allowed Russians to compete as “individual neutral athletes.” The IOC also suspended the Russian Olympic Committee in 2023 for forcibly taking over Ukrainian sporting organizations in the four Ukrainian regions that the Kremlin illegallyexpropriated.

Russian leadership has decried the ban. The Russian Olympic Committee said the 2022 decision “violate[d] the Fundamental Principles of Olympism,” while Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova likened Russia’s exclusion from the 2024 Paris Games to “neo-Nazism.” The Russian athletes most accessible to the Western press—hockey players in the National Hockey League (NHL)—have lamented losing the opportunity to play for national glory against their peers on the world’s biggest stage.

When the 2026 Winter Olympic Games kick off in Italy on Feb. 6, there will be no participation from Russian teams and very limited participation from individual Russian athletes competing as “neutrals.” The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is continuing the ban imposed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and has mandated extra screening of athletes in sports whose federations have allowed Russians to compete as “individual neutral athletes.” The IOC also suspended the Russian Olympic Committee in 2023 for forcibly taking over Ukrainian sporting organizations in the four Ukrainian regions that the Kremlin illegallyexpropriated.

Russian leadership has decried the ban. The Russian Olympic Committee said the 2022 decision “violate[d] the Fundamental Principles of Olympism,” while Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova likened Russia’s exclusion from the 2024 Paris Games to “neo-Nazism.” The Russian athletes most accessible to the Western press—hockey players in the National Hockey League (NHL)—have lamented losing the opportunity to play for national glory against their peers on the world’s biggest stage.

The pleas of Russian athletes may seem sympathetic to Western sports fans. But the Putin regime uses any Russian sporting glory as propaganda to validate its rule. The Kremlin has longconsidered athletic success to be a national political resource, hence its history of using spy services to facilitate systematic doping, attack those who exposed it, and undermine the reputation of its competitors.

Russia has repeatedly used successful athletes to legitimize its full-scale war against Ukraine. During a March 2022 pro-war rally to commemorate the anniversary of the annexation of Crimea, Russian President Vladimir Putin brought out numerous athletes to serve as mascots of his new campaign of aggression. Some athletes lean even more enthusiastically into their roles as propaganda weapons, like 2022 gold medalist and cross-country skier Veronika Stepanova. Standing beside Putin at a Kremlin ceremony honoring fellow Olympic champions that April, she said, “Before my eyes, Russia has once again become strong, proud, and successful. Not everyone in the world likes this … but we are on the right path, and we will definitely win, just like we did at the Olympics. Thank you so much [to Putin] for raising our country’s flag high. And we will not lower it, I promise.”

Hockey provides another recent example of Russia using its athletes to bolster its war and the Putin regime. Last April, Alexander Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals broke the NHL’s all-time goal scoring record. In his ceremonial remarks after the game, the Moscow-born hockey star declared, “All of you fans, the whole world, Russia—we did it, boys! It’s history.” His triumph garnered congratulations from Russian officials as senior as Putin himself, but two reactions from the apparatchik class stand out.

State Duma deputy Andrey Alshevskikh said, “Despite the sanctions, despite the discrimination, despite everything, Russians are winning. No one will stop us.” Even more remarkable praise came from Russia’s minister of sport and the head of its Olympic committee, Mikhail Degtyarev, who said, “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. … 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 favorite of millions, and the best scorer in the NHL.” Both officials are outspokensupporters of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Ovechkin himself has been less explicit about his country’s aggression against Ukraine. He made a generic call for “no more war” at the outbreak of the full-scale invasion. However, at the beginning of Russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine in 2014, he posed for a clearly anti-Ukrainian photo that called to “save children from fascism” and served as the nominalfounder of the Putin Team project, which campaigned for Putin’s 2018 reelection.

Some Russian athletes have pushed back against the political use of their fame. In April 2022, figure skating world champion Elizaveta Tuktamysheva agreed to participate in a skating event put on by fellow champion figure skater and later official Putin political representative Evgeni Pluschenko. She was upset 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 don’t want the athletes’ performances to become a means of manipulation and persuasion,” Tuktamysheva posted on Instagram afterward.

Aleksandra Boykova, a European champion pairs skater, also indicated that her participation was involuntarily co-opted for political means. However, neither Boykova nor Tuktamysheva actually condemned the event’s pro-war message. Russia’s use of its athletes as pro-war mascots is standard practice, but the event in Tula shows that the Kremlin will co-opt its athletes’ triumphs as a weapon in the war against Ukraine, regardless of their consent.

The Kremlin’s weaponization of athletic success and theft of Ukrainian sports stand in addition to the terrible damage that Russian aggression has broughtuponUkrainian sports and the horrors to which Ukrainian athletes have been subjected. Moreover, according to the Angels of Sport project, Russia has killed at least 516 Ukrainian coaches and athletes—a number that the project says is far from complete.

When noting the partial unfreezing of the ban on Russian athletes during remarks at a November 2025 summit on Russian sports, Degtyarev said that “the victories of our athletes [are] our most important diplomacy.” Indeed, according to activists, many of the Russians that the IOC has cleared to compete as neutral athletes nevertheless remain integrated into state structures and propaganda. The world sporting establishment should take Degtyarev at his word and recognize that Russian athletes remain geopolitical instruments.

Russia is not the only country that has invaded another during the recent history of the Olympics or to use sports glory for political ends. Hockey fans may also lament that this year’s men’s tournament will suffer without Russian participation now that NHL stars are returning to Olympic ice. But Russia has used its military to steal Ukrainian sports in concert with its theft of Ukrainian people and territory, and the Kremlin weaponizes its athletes’ achievements to legitimize its aggression against Ukraine. These are transgressions that international sports cannot abide, and the IOC is right to punish them severely.

The Olympic Charter’s second fundamental principle holds that “[t]he goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.” Russia’s use of athletes as political tools to promote its war of aggression (which it shows no sign of halting), along with its destruction and armed robbery of Ukrainian sports, is an intolerable desecration of this principle.

This means that keeping Russia out of the Milan Games was the only acceptable choice, and that FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s call to return Russia to international soccer is completely inappropriate. Instead, Furthermore, Putin’s endeavors to return the country to international sports must be rejected by the Olympics and sporting federations around the world to ensure that Russia cannot use peaceful sports as a weapon in its war against Ukraine.