A new investigation by Suspilne, Ukraine's independent public broadcaster, has identified Russian military veterans who served in units accused of war crimes in Ukraine now appearing on Paralympic team rosters — raising urgent questions about the adequacy of international eligibility frameworks and the capacity of sports governing bodies to distinguish individual athletic credentials from criminal culpability at the unit level.
The investigation represents the most systematic effort to date to trace the pathways through which Russia may be embedding active veterans of the Ukraine war into international athletic competition, at a moment when the International Paralympic Committee continues to grapple with the question of Russian participation in international sport.
What the investigation found
Suspilne, which has maintained credible investigative journalism standards throughout the war despite operating under wartime conditions, cross-referenced Russian Paralympic team nominations with military service records and unit designations documented in open-source intelligence, Ukrainian military and prosecutorial filings, and international human rights investigations. The methodology is explicit: this is not witness testimony or inference. It is documentary linkage between named individuals and specific military units.
The units in question are among those cited in investigations by international human rights organizations and Ukrainian authorities in connection with documented atrocities — including incidents at Bucha, Mariupol, and in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
The IPC eligibility framework and how it is being exploited
The International Paralympic Committee — which in 2022 moved to exclude Russian and Belarusian athletes from international competition following the invasion of Ukraine — has maintained a framework of exceptions and case-by-case review. The policy was designed to balance collective accountability with individual rights. In practice, its complexity creates openings.
Suspilne's investigation suggests the Russian state apparatus has identified and is systematically exploiting those openings. Veterans are being channeled into Paralympic programs where eligibility review processes are less granular than in standard Olympic pathways, and where the documentation of military service histories is not routinely cross-checked against war crimes accountability databases.
In Russia, as in much of the former Soviet space, understanding requires reading between the lines. The use of sports as a vehicle for projecting national normalcy — and for rehabilitating the reputations of institutions or individuals under international opprobrium — has deep roots in the post-Soviet playbook. What is distinctive here is the specificity of the allegations and the quality of the supporting documentation.
The accountability question
The IPC has not yet issued a public response to Suspilne's specific findings. The committee's position, maintained since 2022, is that Russian and Belarusian athletes cannot compete under their national flags but that individual case review is possible. Critics of this framework — including Ukrainian Paralympic officials and international human rights lawyers — have argued that without systematic vetting of military service records, the case-by-case approach is functionally porous.
The broader legal and ethical question is whether participation in international sport by individuals from units credibly accused of war crimes constitutes a form of impunity laundering — and whether the IPC has either the mandate or the resources to conduct the due diligence that would be required to prevent it.
The sporting and diplomatic dimensions
For Ukraine, the investigation is simultaneously a documentation project and a diplomatic tool. Ukrainian officials have been pressing international sports bodies since 2022 to adopt more rigorous vetting standards for Russian and Belarusian athletes. The Suspilne findings will almost certainly be submitted formally to the IPC and to relevant national eligibility authorities.
For the IPC, the findings present an institutional challenge that extends beyond Russia. If an independent broadcaster can establish documented links between named athletes and war crimes-accused units using open-source methods, the committee's own eligibility processes will face serious questions about why those links were not identified through official channels.
Suspilne's investigation is a serious piece of wartime accountability journalism. Its findings deserve systematic institutional engagement — not procedural deflection.
