Ukraine Appeals to Sport’s Highest Court to Reverse Russia’s Olympic Reinstatement

Ukraine has taken its fight over Russia’s return to world sport to the highest court in the games. On July 29, the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine filed an appeal with the Court of Arbitration for Sport, challenging the International Olympic Committee’s July 7 decision to provisionally reinstate the Russian Olympic Committee and scrap the neutral-athlete rules that had governed Russian participation for more than three years. For anyone following track, road and distance running, the practical picture has not changed, because World Athletics keeps its own blanket ban on Russian and Belarusian athletes regardless of what the IOC does.

What Ukraine Is Arguing

In its filing, first detailed by Forbes contributor Mark Temnycky, the Ukrainian committee argued that the IOC’s reinstatement “contradicts the provisions of the Olympic Charter,” which requires members to respect the territorial integrity of other national Olympic committees. Ukraine said the decision was “made prematurely and without proper verification of whether the violations” that led to the original suspension “had actually been resolved.”

Those violations date to October 2023, when the IOC suspended the Russian Olympic Committee after Russia moved to bring Olympic councils in the occupied Ukrainian regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia under its own authority. Russia challenged that suspension at the Court of Arbitration for Sport and lost, with the court upholding the ban in 2024 on territorial-integrity grounds. Because Russia still occupies parts of those four regions, Ukraine argues, the conditions that justified the suspension remain in place, and it says it will keep defending “the principles of the Olympic Charter, international law, and the territorial integrity” of Ukraine.

Russia’s Response and a Wall of Criticism

Russian officials brushed the appeal aside. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said Ukraine “apparently has no other problems,” while Dmitry Svishchev, a senior figure on the Russian State Duma’s sports committee, called the filing a “waste of time, effort, and money.”

The IOC’s July 7 move drew objections well beyond Kyiv. On July 14, nine European Union nations, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania and Sweden, sent a joint letter urging the EU to cut funding to sports bodies that have readmitted Russian and Belarusian athletes, including the IOC. Canada’s secretary of sport, former Olympic kayaker Adam van Koeverden, said he was “appalled” by the reinstatement, and lawmakers from both parties in the United States criticized the decision. The athlete-advocacy groups Global Athlete and FairSport said the IOC’s step “represents a fundamental departure from the principles of Olympism.” The IOC, for its part, said its reinstatement was provisional and conditional, that it continues to condemn the invasion, and that returning Russian athletes must clear a set of anti-doping requirements before competing.

For Track and Field, a Separate Door

None of this, on its own, puts a Russian sprinter or distance runner back on an international start line. Four days before the IOC acted, on July 3, the World Athletics Council reaffirmed its own ban on Russian and Belarusian athletes, officials and support staff across all of its competitions. President Sebastian Coe tied the sanctions to the war rather than to Russian sport, citing the absence of “any tangible movement towards peace negotiations,” and the Russian Athletics Federation called the ruling “discriminatory.”

The two bans are worth keeping straight. World Athletics ended its separate, doping-related suspension of the Russian federation in 2023, but the sanctions tied to the invasion are a different matter, and those are the ones the sport’s governing body has repeatedly extended, even after the IOC urged it to readmit Belarus. The gap is already visible at the youth level: Russia’s athletics federation said its track and field athletes received no quotas for the 2026 Youth Olympic Games in Dakar this fall, according to Ukrainian outlet UA News, even as the IOC has cleared Russian youth athletes in principle.

What’s at Stake

The Court of Arbitration for Sport’s ruling will reach past this one dispute. It will shape whether Russia can send a full national team to the Los Angeles 2028 Summer Olympics, and it will set a precedent for how the Olympic movement weighs a member’s conduct against the Charter’s rules. The appeal is the latest turn in a slow easing that has run alongside the war: Russian and Belarusian athletes competed as neutrals at the Paris 2024 Games, the International Paralympic Committee lifted its ban in September 2025 ahead of the 2026 Winter Paralympics, an opening ceremony that 16 countries boycotted, and the IOC dropped its restrictions on Belarus in May before easing them for Russia in July. For now, Ukraine is betting that the same court that upheld the ban once will do so again, while track and field waits, as it has all along, on the war rather than on the IOC.