The Long Game: How Russia Walked Back Into World Sport
Russia's back competing in swimming, judo, fencing, the Paralympic Games and more. The Sports and Crime Briefing looks at how this return was inevitable.
On April 13, World Aquatics Bureau announced that Russian and Belarusian athletes would compete in swimming, diving, artistic swimming and water polo under their national flags, anthems and uniforms with immediate effect.
The decision lifts all restrictions on Belarusian or Russian athletes, except for standard anti-doping controls and background checks. World Aquatics President Husain Al Musallam said that “pools and open water remain places where athletes from all nations can come together in peaceful competition.”
The timing was inconvenient. Ukraine was supposed to face Russia in a Water Polo World Cup Division 2 seventh-place match the same day in Malta.
The Ukrainian water polo team refused to play in protest, resulting in a 5-0 default win for Russia.
The World Aquatics decision provoked immediate outrage from Ukrainian athletes, but it was not a surprise.
Russia’s gradual reinstatement into world sport is the logical terminus of a process running since at least the autumn of 2024, driven by legal architecture, voting mathematics, institutional self-interest, and money — most of it Russian — embedded in international sport governance.
Over 350 Ukrainian citizens have been killed or injured by Russian missile and drone strikes from April 1-9.
1. Sanctions didn’t hold for long
The earliest concessions came within months of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. By spring 2023, fencing, judo, wrestling, canoeing and taekwondo had all opened their doors to Russian and Belarusian athletes under neutral status: no flag, no anthem, individual events only.
Tennis never closed its doors to individual players at all.
The framing was consistent across those early decisions: athletes should not be punished for the decisions of governments. That argument, deployed loudly and early, established a frame of reference that would prove almost impossible to dislodge.
Neutral athlete status is a recognised instrument in international sport, with precedent stretching back decades, and its adoption was defensible on the principle that individual athletes should not be categorically barred from competition solely on the basis of nationality.
The problem was not the neutral status itself. But the conditions attached to neutral participation were not stable. They were treated by Russian sports officials and their federation allies as a starting position rather than a limit.
From late 2024 onward, each condition was gradually stripped away.
In November 2025, World Aquatics permitted neutral Russian athletes to compete in relay and team artistic swimming events, a quiet but consequential breach of the team-event firewall.
28 Russian neutral athletes competed at the Short Course World Championships in Budapest, finishing second on the medal table with six golds and a world record in the men’s 4x100 medley relay.
In April 2025, fencing permitted neutral Russian teams to compete. In May, judo restored the use of the Belarusian flag.
Then in September 2025, the most significant single vote of the period came at the International Paralympic Committee’s General Assembly in Seoul. Member organisations voted against a motion to partially suspend Russia by 91 votes to 77, with 8 abstentions, and against maintaining Belarus’s partial suspension by 103 votes to 63, with 10 abstentions.
On September 28, 2025, the day the IPC restored Russia to full membership, Russia made its third-largest bombing campaign against Ukraine to date.
The body of a young girl was pulled from the rubble of her home in Kyiv. She was 12.
Both nations were fully restored to IPC membership.
Then, full legal backing for removing these sanctions accelerated things.
In December 2025, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) issued operative decisions in CAS 2025/A/11915 and CAS 2025/A/11931, finding that the International Ski Federation's blanket ban was discriminatory under its own statutes.
On the night of December 1, 2025, Russia launched a ballistic missile at Dnipro City in Ukraine. 4 people were killed, 40 more were wounded, 11 of them critically.
The next day, CAS decided a blanket ban against Russian athletes in skiing was discriminatory.
The IOC recommended Russian and Belarusian youth athletes compete under full national symbols at the Dakar Youth Olympics.
FIDE voted 61 to 51 to lift all chess sanctions.
By February 2026, 20 Russian and Belarusian neutral athletes competed at the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. At the Paralympics that followed, Russia competed under its own flag, winning eight golds. Ukraine boycotted both ceremonies.
By February 2026, at the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, 20 Russian and Belarusian neutral athletes competed across eight sports. At the Paralympics that followed, Russia competed under its own flag — per the IPC’s September decision — winning eight golds. Ukraine boycotted both ceremonies.
2. Why Russia was always going to win this
Russia’s progressive return to world sport was ensured by the structural power Russia has built, over decades.
The most important mechanism was personnel placement. Research by Play the Game, analysing all 40 Olympic International Federations, found that in addition to three federation presidents, Russia and Belarus together held four vice-presidencies, one secretary generalship and 20 board positions across those federations as of 2022. A peer-reviewed study by Krieger et al., published in the Asian Journal of Sport History & Culture in June 2023, confirmed this was an explicit government strategy.
Russian nationals were placed in federation leadership positions, with the specific goal of insulating Russian sport from future political pressure. It worked.
The federations where Russia had the deepest leadership stakes moved fastest toward readmission.
Marius Vizer had made Vladimir Putin the IJF's honorary president in 2008. #
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the IJF suspended Putin from that role on February 27, 2022. Vizer himself resisted the original ban, was re-elected unopposed for a sixth term in June 2025, and in November 2025, engineered Russia's full reinstatement by executive committee action, without a membership vote.
On November 27, 2025, the same day the IJF reinstated Russia, five Ukrainian soldiers groups were captured near the village of Zelenyi Hai.
After a brief interrogation, they were executed.
At FIDE, former Russian deputy prime minister Arkady Dvorkovich steered the December 2025 vote to lift chess sanctions through a process that EUobserver both reported as procedurally compromised.
The day before the online General Assembly, FIDE circulated a seven-page memorandum to delegates arguing that continued exclusion of Russian and Belarusian teams would be "discriminatory and disproportionate" and warning of legal risk. It was presented as an independent legal opinion. FIDE did not disclose that its author, Claude Ramoni, had represented the suspended Russian Olympic Committee in multiple CAS proceedings since at least 2019.
3. Fencing as case study
Fencing was the starkest case. Alisher Usmanov has run the FIE since 2008, financing the federation through his International Charitable Foundation for the Future of Fencing to the tune of at least $98.5 million over 13 years. A single 2020 donation of CHF 5 million accounting for 93 percent of the federation’s entire income that year.
In practical terms, international fencing has become a financial dependency of a sanctioned Russian oligarch.
When EU sanctions were imposed on Usmanov in February 2022, he stepped back and installed Greek three-time Olympian Emmanuel Katsiadakis as interim president.
In November 2024, in Tashkent, Usmanov’s home city, he was re-elected to the position. Usmanov then self-suspended his powers again four days after his own re-election, returning the chair to Katsiadakis. The purpose, as one observer told The Sports Examiner, was “to prevent anyone from leading the sport” other than Usmanov.
Katsiadakis lasted until April 2025. He resigned, officially citing health reasons. Multiple FIE insiders told the New Voice of Ukraine and The Inquisitor Magazine that the real reason was his refusal to write a letter to President Trump requesting that Usmanov’s sanctions be lifted ahead of the LA 2028 Olympics.
He was replaced by Egypt’s Abdelmoneim El Husseiny. By that point, the FIE had already gutted its neutrality verification process, replacing independent background checks with athlete self-declarations, a move condemned in an open letter signed by 447 fencers from 40 countries, published by Global Athlete on July 17, 2025.
The federation that had been built on Usmanov’s money was never going to hold the line against Russia’s return.
On January 23, 2026, the FIE removed Estonia as host of the 2026 European Fencing Championships for refusing to grant visas to Russian and Belarusian athletes.
On January 23, 2026, the same day as the FIE punished Estonia for not granting visas to Russian athletes, Russia launched over 100 drones and ballistic missiles at Ukraine. At least six people were killed and 45 more were injured.
Russia has spent years cultivating alliances with Central Asian, Middle Eastern and African federations, many of which received development funding from Russian-aligned presidents. Usmanov’s own re-election result illustrated it: support came from Israel, Palestine, the Philippines, South Africa: a genuinely global coalition built over 15 years of financial investment.
The IPC vote in Seoul made the same arithmetic visible on the biggest stage: the coalition that voted to maintain sanctions was substantial. It was still outnumbered. The nations living closest to Russia’s war are a minority of the global sporting electorate.
4. CAS Rulings Help Russia
The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) is not an instrument of Russian policy. The logic of its rulings has been consistent: blanket nationality-based exclusions violate anti-discrimination provisions in federations’ own statutes.
But Russia has deployed this argument strategically, filing challenges against FIS, the International Biathlon Union, the International Luge Federation and others in coordinated succession. The luge case was the precedent-setter.
CAS case 2025/A/11479, decided on October 31, 2025, found that “the complete exclusion of Russian athletes was not a proportionate measure.”
The December 2025 FIS ruling went further. CAS cases 2025/A/11915 and 2025/A/11931, found that “the FIS Statutes require the FIS to be politically neutral and that the FIS Council did not provide sufficient legal justification for the exclusion of Russian and Belarusian athletes and para-athletes.”
This overturned a democratic membership vote in favour of continuing the ban, making clear that even procedurally legitimate federation decisions could be voided by CAS on anti-discrimination grounds.
For those that had genuinely wanted to hold the line, the FIS ruling functioned as a final warning: your ban may not hold.
5. The holdouts
Three major federations have maintained meaningful restrictions as of April 2026. Understanding why they held matters as much as understanding why others folded.
World Athletics under Sebastian Coe has maintained the most absolute position: no neutral status, no individual exceptions, nothing. Coe first articulated the grounds in March 2023, citing “the death and destruction we have seen in Ukraine over the past year, including the deaths of some 185 athletes.” By July 2024, when Coe met President Zelenskyy in Kyiv, World Athletics reported the toll had exceeded 400 athletes and coaches killed.
Coe controls a federation with strong financial independence from Russian sources, a membership concentrated in nations with high political sensitivity to the conflict, and a legal argument CAS has not yet fully tested: World Athletics’ rules include specific provisions allowing exclusion on the basis of systematic doping non-compliance, not solely nationality, which provides a distinct legal basis from those overturned in the luge and FIS cases.
FIFA and UEFA have maintained Russia’s exclusion from the 2026 World Cup and all competitive football, though the picture is complicated. In a February 2026 interview, FIFA President Gianni Infantino said the ban “has not achieved anything, it has just created more frustration and hatred” That comment was read widely as the opening of a negotiation rather than a statement of settled policy.
The International Biathlon Union has maintained its ban and is currently defending a CAS challenge filed by Russian athletes in December 2025. Biathlon’s membership is dominated by Nordic and central European nations for whom the political stakes of readmission are highest, and the sport has limited financial exposure to Russian money.
But the IBU’s legal position after the FIS ruling is precarious. The IBU has acknowledged the challenge in its official communications without signalling confidence in the outcome.