All Russians and Belarusians are barred from participating in the Wimbledon tennis tournament, including those who have spoken out against Vladimir Putin and Russia. To echo the same sentiment, a Ukrainian tennis star has demanded that Russian players be subjected to ideological purity test.
Elina Svitolina, a Ukrainian tennis player, has urged that players from Russia and Belarus be subjected to ideological purity tests before being permitted to participate in international competitions.
All Russian and Belarusian competitors will be banned if they do not sign a succession of comments on politics and the war in Ukraine, according to the former world number three.
“We noticed that some Russian and Belarusian players at some point vaguely mentioned the war, but never clearly stating that Russia and Belarus started it on the territory of Ukraine,” wrote Svitolina on Twitter.
She is assumedly dissatisfied with Russian and Belarusian players who simply call for tranquility without expressly rejecting and blaming their own country for the conflict.
“The very silence of those who choose to remain that way right now is unbearable as it leads to the continuation of murder in our homeland,” Svitolina alleged, claiming that tennis players who do not appropriately say “Putin bad” are really killing people.
She requested that players born on a patch of land known as “Russia” appropriately address the following questions.
1. Do you endorse Russia’s and Belarus’ military operation of Ukraine’s territory, as well as the war that has ensued as a consequence of that operation?
2. Do you support the military actions of Russia and Belarus in Ukraine?
3. Do you support the regimes of Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko?
According to Svitolina, any player who answers yes to any of those queries should face a full-fledged tournament ban.
“In times of crisis, silence means agreeing with what is happening. There comes a time when silence is betrayal, and that time is now,” she wrote.
The Ukrainian requirement that players undergo ideological purity checks before hitting a ball with a racket is not even close to the level enforced by the Wimbledon tennis tournament organizers.
All Russians and Belarusians are barred from participating, including those who have spoken out against Vladimir Putin and Russia.
Novak Djokavic, the former world number one men’s tennis player, termed the move “crazy,” adding politics should not be allowed to intervene in sports.
2 Responses
AZOV Brigades good – – russians bad, t.y. Greta ………. …. shalom, al jenkins
XD
What else? Race hygiene tests? In Nazi-Ukraine, there are race laws active. If you don’t belong to the Herrenrasse or a tiny amount of alibi minorities like the Crimean tatars, you are not allowed to speak your own language! Russians, Jews and the like are seen as, and often called, subhumans.