13-time Ukrainian champions Shakhtar Donetsk has asked for the removal of the Russian Football Federation’s membership from UEFA and FIFA.
One of the biggest clubs in Ukraine, Shakhtar have won four of the last five national league titles and are a regular feature in the UEFA Champions League.
The club’s CEO Serhiy Palkin has recently asked for Russia to be removed from FIFA and UEFA’s membership. Speaking to Reuters, he suggested that Russia be removed in the same manner as apartheid-era South Africa.
Russian clubs and teams are already completely suspended from participating in international tournaments, but the Russian Football Union continues to be a full member of FIFA and UEFA.
The most recent FIFA annual congress will be held in Doha, hosts of the upcoming World Cup, on Thursday. Ukraine’s federation is not likely to be present in the congress but the Russian Football Union is expected to be there.
“I would like to urge UEFA and FIFA to take a step further and cancel or suspend Russia’s membership in their ranks,”
Palkin told Reuters in a text message.
“In the 70s, South Africa was expelled from FIFA for the policy of apartheid, and Russia should be expelled for the policy of genocide of Ukrainians and the bloody war they unleashed in our homeland,”
“Sport has always been used by Russians as propaganda for their ideology. If this ideology threatens peaceful coexistence today, Russia must be fully isolated until it changes its policy of destroying every living creature,”
the Shakhtar official added.
Shakhtar are having to play their home games in Lyiv, Kharkiv and the capital city Kyiv since the outbreak of the conflict in the Donbas region in 2014. The Ukrainian league is completely suspended right now because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
FIFA has attracted plenty of criticism for allowing Russian officials to attend the annual congress in Qatar, all the while representatives of the Ukraine FA are unable to join the meeting.
With 210 football federations present in the meeting, the Russian federation showed defiance and suggested that they ‘are not going to hide.’ Russia was prevented from playing Poland in a World Cup qualification play-off earlier this month and has been banned from the competition, while UEFA has also excluded Russian clubs from international competition.
Russia was represented at the federation’s flagship event by Aleksandr Alaev, the federation’s secretary-general and Alexey Sorokin, who headed the 2018 World Cup organizing committee. The latter openly challenged Russia’s ban from world football, a decision that was maintained by the FIFA Council.
Russia have challenged the World Cup as well as participation in European competitions ban in the Court of Arbitration of Sport, but both the petitions have been dismissed.
