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European Commissioner for Sport Glenn Micallef has condemned the participation of Russian and Belarusian athletes in the Milan-Cortina Paralympic Games under their national flags and announced a boycott of the Opening Ceremony, which will be hosted at the Verona Arena on 6 March.
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“While Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine continues, I cannot support the reinstatement of national symbols, flags, anthems, and uniforms, that are inseparable from that conflict,” he wrote on X.
“For this reason, I will not attend the Paralympics Opening Ceremony.”
Micallef made his announcement after the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) confirmed that six Russian and four Belarusian athletes will be allowed to compete under their national flags this year, telling news agency AFP on Tuesday that they will be treated like those from any other country.
Russian and Belarusian olympians have been prohibited from competing under their flags in the Olympics and Paralympics since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
They are, however, allowed to participate as “individual neutral athletes”, a category that allows people who have qualified for the games to join the competition under certain conditions, such as not actively supporting the invasion and not being contracted to the Russian or Belarusian military or national security agencies.
These conditions were applied in the Olympic and Paralympic Games Paris 2024 and are also the rules for the current Milan-Cortina Olympics, with 13 Russian and seven Belarusian athletes participating in the competition.
But the IPC lifted its suspension during a general assembly in September 2024,while in December, the Swiss-based Sports Administrative Court ruled that excluding Russian and Belarusian athletes from the qualifying rounds violated the International Ski and Snowboard Federation’s statute.
The IPC then allowed the athletes to attempt to qualify for the Winter Paralympics, which resulted in six Russians (a man and a woman in Paralympic alpine skiing, a man and a woman in Paralympic cross-country skiing and two men in Paralympic snowboarding) and four Belarusians (one man and three women in Paralympic cross-country skiing) joining the competition.
The Latvian Minister of Foreign Affairs also criticised the latest decision, calling on the IPC to reconsider it urgently.
