“Ъ”: Lukashenka Put On Penalty Bench

The International Ice Hockey Federation will probably deprive Minsk of the Ice Hockey World Championship.

Today Belarus may lose the status of one of the hosts - along with Latvia - of the next hockey world championship. The International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) seems to have no choice but to take the tournament away from it due to strong political and financial pressure on the office, while the most important sponsors are threatening to leave it. Latvia, Denmark, and Slovakia have already expressed their readiness to undertake the part of the championship for which Belarus was responsible, Kommersant writes.

Today a meeting of the Council of the International Ice Hockey Federation will take place, dedicated to the most painful topic ever. It is associated with the holding of the IIHF main tournament - the Ice Hockey World Championship, which did not take place in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. The next one was to be jointly hosted from May 21 to May 6 by Riga and Minsk.

The question about the Belarusian capital arose almost immediately after the election results were announced in August, followed by incessant mass protests. A number of organizations - sports and political, including the European Parliament - called on the IIHF to take away the World Cup from Belarus due to systematic violations of human rights in the country, as well as the difficult situation. Meanwhile, Aliaksandr Lukashenka flatly refused to allow such a scenario for several months. Lukashenka stressed that there are no grounds for transferring the championship from Minsk, promising to organize an “absolutely safe” and even “best in history” tournament. Meanwhile, it seems that at the moment the IIHF has no choice but to take away the competition from Belarus.

Last week, Federation President Rene Fasel made a trip to Minsk, after which he faced a wave of criticism. It was primarily associated with his photos suggestive of friendly meetings in the company of Aliaksandr Lukashenka and the Head of the Belarusian Ice Hockey Federation Dzmitry Baskau. lukashenka, who heads, among other things, the National Olympic Committee of Belarus, and Baskau, whom the IIHF calls a suspect of complicity in the murder of oppositionist Raman Bandarenka, were subjected to the sanctions of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). They, in particular, provide for a ban for both to enter Latvia during the World Cup.

Perhaps even more recent events have turned into a decisive argument in favor of the expediency of an emergency transfer. First, the Nivea brand announced the support of the IIHF in the event that Belarus is out of the championship. And on Saturday, Skoda announced the same on its Twitter account. The report said that while “proudly possessing for 28 years” the status of an IIHF partner, the car company nonetheless “respects and promotes human rights”. For IIHF, the loss of Skoda would mean colossal damage to both material and image.

Rene Fasel, predicting in an interview with TASS the outcome of the disputes about the World Cup, actually admitted the hopelessness of the Federation's situation. According to him, IIHF has “serious problems both with sponsors and from the political side,” and he described the partnership demarches as “another important factor” that proved the need to arrange an emergency meeting of the IIHF council.

At the same time, we cannot say that depriving Belarus of the right to host part of the World Cup will become a disaster threatening emergency from the point of view of its organization. The fact is that there are already applicants to take it away from Minsk. Earlier, the Latvian authorities had declared their full readiness to hold the championship. Meanwhile, Rene Fasel, telling TASS about the likely consequences of the IIHF council, noted that his structure also has a “proposal from Denmark”, and in addition, it is “in the stage of discussing the holding of the tournament with Bratislava”, the capital of Slovakia.