Ukraine’s president Zelensky says Russian athletes should be banned from the Olympics

Key takeaways: 

• Russian athletes should be allowed to play at the Olympics, Zelensky says. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky states that letting Russia contend at the 2024 Olympics in Paris would show that “terror is somehow fair”.

Zelensky feels Russian athletes should be barred from the Olympics 2024: 

He stated he had raised the matter with French President Emmanuel Macron.

He continued that Moscow must not be permitted to use the Olympics for propaganda.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has stated that Russian and Belarusian players could contend as neutrals at the Olympics.

Ukraine’s president Zelensky talks about boycotting Olympics 2024: 

But Ukraine has been intimidated to boycott Paris 2024 if Russian and Belarusian players are allowed to contend.

Attempts by the IOC “to get Russian players back into the Olympic Games are tries to tell the entire world that terror is somehow fair”, Mr Zelensky said in his nightly video talk.

The IOC stated this week that Russian and Belarusian players could contend as “neutral athletes”, saying that “no athlete should be stopped from competing just because of their passport”.

Zelensky says there’s no neutrality in sports: 

But Mr Zelensky feels there can be no objectivity in sports while his nation’s athletes die on the battleground.

He even drew a comparison with the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin when the Nazis were in control.

“There was a significant Olympic error,” he said. “The Olympic movement and terrorist forms indeed should not cross paths.”

The UK government has also criticised the plan to let athletes compete neutrally as a “world away from the truth of war”.

Mr Zelensky’s remarks came as Russian forces continued to shoot the Ukrainian region of Kherson into the evening after a day of attacks which left at least three people dead.

Local officers say that six others were injured, two of them when a hospital was hit.