MOSCOW/MILAN — The International Paralympic Committee has lifted its suspension of Russia and Belarus, clearing the path for athletes from both countries to compete at the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Paralympic Games. The decision, reported by France24, arrives as both governments remain under international isolation over the ongoing war in Ukraine, and it will be read in Moscow as precisely what it is: a step back toward normalization by a major international sporting body.
The IPC's decision follows a pattern that has played out in various forms across international sports governance since 2022. Governing bodies — under pressure from both ethical and operational concerns — have oscillated between exclusion and conditional readmission, typically settling on frameworks that permit participation under neutral status, stripped of national flags and anthems. Whether that framework applies here, and under what specific conditions, was not immediately detailed in public IPC communications reviewed by this correspondent.
The Kremlin's approach to such moments is methodical. Each incremental readmission to international sport — whether in athletics, chess, or now Paralympic competition — is catalogued by state media and official spokespeople as evidence that Russia's isolation is artificial, temporary, and eroding. The Paralympic reinstatement will be no exception. That it involves athletes competing at the elite level under disability — individuals whose athletic achievement is, in purely sporting terms, entirely their own — makes the political framing in Moscow easier to sustain: the decision can be presented as a triumph of common sense and humanitarian sporting values over what Russian officials routinely characterize as Western-led politicization.
Ukraine's reaction to the decision was swift and condemnatory. Ukrainian Paralympic officials and sports ministry representatives have consistently argued that Russian and Belarusian athletes cannot be credibly separated from the apparatus of states actively prosecuting a war on Ukrainian territory. The Ukrainian Paralympic Committee has previously threatened boycotts in the event of Russian and Belarusian readmission, and those threats are likely to be revisited in the coming days. For Kyiv, each such decision by an international body is not merely a sporting matter — it is a test of whether the international community's stated solidarity carries practical weight.
The IPC, for its part, has argued that its frameworks — individual eligibility assessments, neutral status requirements, exclusion of athletes with active military or security service affiliations — represent a principled effort to separate individual athletes from state conduct. Critics, including Ukrainian officials and human rights organizations, argue that this separation is functionally impossible when athletes are trained, funded, and celebrated by the same state apparatus prosecuting an illegal war.
In Russia, as in much of the former Soviet space, understanding requires reading between the lines. The substantive question of whether disabled Russian athletes competing under a neutral flag in Milan-Cortina meaningfully advances the Kremlin's geopolitical position is, in strict terms, debatable. The symbolic question — whether the decision feeds a narrative of normalization at a moment when Moscow badly needs such narratives — is not.
