What will UEFA say? Russia includes a club from Crimea in its championship

FC Sevastopol will be able to start in the new draw of the second division of the Russian Football Championship. The club has received the relevant certificate from the Football National League (FNL) and will be included in the new season's tournament participants.

This is stated on the website of the second league of the Russian championship. "A meeting of the Football National League commission took place, at which it was decided to issue an FNL certificate to clubs to participate in the Second League competitions in Division B. Among those who received the certificate is FC Sevastopol," the statement said.

This means that the aggressor country has violated the requirements of the European Football Union (UEFA), which has banned it from including teams from the annexed peninsula in its championship. However, Russia hopes to deceive UEFA and not make Crimean clubs members of the Russian Football Union (RFU), but only invite them to participate in the championship.

"If we accept Crimean clubs as members of the Russian Federation, we may no longer be in UEFA. But take, for example, Crimean amateur and children's teams - they take part in various competitions held, among other things, in Russia. We have many clubs that are not members of the Russian Federation. And they take part in our competitions," RFU Secretary General Maxim Mitrofanov said in April.

 As a reminder, UEFA does not recognise Crimea as a territory of Russia. TSK (Simferopol), FCSF (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 reported by OBOZREVATEL, 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.

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