Kremlin dictator Vladimir Putin has criticized the leadership of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for suspending Russia from the competition. The president of the aggressor country, who gave the criminal order to invade Ukraine, accused the organization of "ethnic discrimination."

Putin said this at the "Sport Without Borders" plenary session, Sport24 reports. He issued the traditional narratives of his propaganda about the impossibility of politicizing sports, adding that Russian athletes allegedly have nothing to do with the terrorist state. The Kremlin leader called Russia a co-founder of the IOC and the Olympic Games.

"Our country stood at the origins of the modern Olympic movement. Public figure Alexey Butovsky is an associate of Pierre de Coubertin and co-founder of the IOC. However, 'thanks' to some of the leaders of the modern IOC, we learned that an invitation to the Games is not an unconditional right of the best athletes, but a kind of privilege and can be earned not by sports results but by some political gestures that have nothing to do with sports at all, and that the Games themselves can be used as an instrument of political pressure on people who have nothing to do with politics, and as a form of gross and, in fact, racist and ethnic discrimination," Putin said.

Earlier, the IOC suspended Russia's membership in the organization because of the illegal inclusion of the councils of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions of Ukraine.

As OBOZ.UA previously reported, four-time Olympian Alexander Tikhonov called Russia too kind after being expelled from the IOC.

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