Belarus’ national football team should be kicked out of international competitions immediately, the country’s opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya said on Wednesday.
Speaking to POLITICO in Brussels, Tikhanovskaya said: “I am for excluding pro-regime teams” until dictator Alexander Lukashenko is deposed in Minsk.
Tikhanovskaya said she still thinks about the sportspeople who spoke out against Lukashenko and had to flee or were locked up at the height of the Belarusian protests in 2020, and she criticized current national team players for showing “loyalty” to the regime. “When you are visiting countries and playing for a terrorist team, it’s awful,” she added.
“I understand sport has to be beyond politics,” she said. “But now it’s all politics, when members of your team are being detained or tortured.”
Tikhanovskaya’s remarks come as European football’s governing body UEFA faces mounting pressure over Belarus’ inclusion in last weekend’s draw for Euro 2024 qualification, despite its support for Moscow and Russian President Vladimir Putin who is waging a bloody war in Ukraine.
According to a report last month in Der Spiegel, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser wrote to UEFA demanding that Belarus be excluded from the 2024 tournament, which will be hosted by Germany.
It’s a proposal that UEFA leadership is currently giving short shrift to.
Earlier this week, UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin told Germany’s Bild newspaper about Belarus: “It’s a bit populist to say you have to exclude them. At the moment, we see no reason to do so. If things change, we will obviously react. Politicians should respect our right to make decisions. We don’t tell politicians and governments what to do.”
UEFA did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Tikhanovskaya’s remarks.
Russia was kicked out of international competitions by UEFA and world football’s governing body FIFA in the days after the Kremlin launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February.
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