Aided by the Belarusian, Chinese, Iranian and North Korean dictatorships, Vladimir Putin has been waging a war of aggression against Ukraine for two years, as part of a more general plan to destabilize Western liberal democracies.
Forced annexations and Russification, mass civilian bombardments, child deportations, rapes and summary executions, and other war crimes, environmental crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Russian soldiery and mercenaries in the Kremlin's keep pose a grave threat on Europe's doorstep.
Yet, like previous Russian military aggressions – the occupation of part of Georgia in 2008 and annexation of Crimea in 2014 – the Russian war against Ukraine is part of the globalized staging of the Olympic Games, now those of Paris 2024. It relies on Russia and China's organic collaborative ties with the International Olympic Committee (IOC), its president Thomas Bach in particular.
It was during the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Games that Xi Jinping and Putin unveiled their plans to inaugurate "a new era of international affairs" to realize "genuine democracy in a post-Western world." One hundred and fifty thousand Russian troops supported by columns of armored vehicles were massed on the Ukrainian border.
Intensely prepared, while international opinion allowed itself to be distracted by the gliding champions in the world's largest dictatorship, the war against Ukraine was eventually unleashed on February 24, 2022, shortly after the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games, but just before the start of the Paralympic Games.
IOC concerned about sales
By the time the Paralympic medals were being counted, the Russian military and its auxiliaries were guilty of mass criminal acts, using ballistic missiles, cluster bombs and other wide-area explosive weapons against Ukrainian civilians. The Olympic gigantism framed by the military-police apparatus of the Chinese party-state was still putting on a show and cynically celebrating Olympic peace when Russia and Belarus were breaking the Olympic truce, trampling for the umpteenth time on the spurious principles of the Olympic Charter, and openly violating international law.
The International Paralympic Committee (IPC) reacted swiftly and strongly to these violations, expelling athletes from the two offending countries from Beijing. On the other hand, Bach, who has been in charge of the Games since 2013, confined himself on February 28 to recommending that the international federations exclude these countries from their competitions.
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