The 'general director' of the Sevastopol football club, Valeriy Chaly, complained that Ukraine was preventing his players from changing their football citizenship. On June 1, it became known that the Crimean team had received a certificate from the Football National League (FNL) of Russia and would be included in the new season's tournament.

"Unfortunately, we have eight people with Ukrainian passports. We are talking about football passports, not civilian ones. Ukraine prevents the change of such football sports citizenship," Chaly said in an interview with Match TV.

As a reminder, UEFA does not recognise Crimea as a territory of Russia. TSK (Simferopol), SCF (Sevastopol) and Zhemchuzhina (Yalta) played in the second league of Russian football in 2014. However, UEFA demanded that the RFU expel them from its membership.

As OBOZREVATEL previously reported, the Russian Federation accused UEFA of being "too quick" to exclude teams from Russia from its tournaments after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine.

Earlier, Chaly accused UEFA and Ukraine of "destroying" football in Crimea.

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