KYIV — Russia’s bid for reacceptance in world sports is gaining momentum ahead of the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. And nowhere has that been more visible than in President Vladimir Putin’s favorite event: judo. The martial art is a notable arena for Moscow’s return to international sport.
Putin has long-standing ties to judo, and the sport’s governing body has become a leading force in decisions about Russian athletes’ participation. Austrian-Romanian executive Marius Vizer is the entrepreneur who has helped transform his sport into a global commercial product since he began leading the International Judo Federation in 2007. But to his detractors, he’s a sports official who built a powerful network connecting Putin, Russia’s elites and global business interests, while maintaining the image of a neutral administrator.
Russia’s ideas are everywhere,” the Ukrainian Judo Federation’s head coach Vitalii Dubrova said in an interview. The International Judo Federation did not respond to POLITICO’s request for comment on Vizer’s ties to Russia. The IJF also did not make Vizer available to reply to requests for comment.
While the IJF offered solidarity funding for Ukrainian judo in 2022 and instituted background checks on Russian and Belarusian athletes in 2023, in November 2025 it became the first major sports organization to fully reinstate Russian athletes — allowing them to compete under their national flag for the first time since the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022. It was part of Moscow’s use of sports as a route back onto the global stage, from comebacks in major tournaments to broader Olympic rehabilitation — and a potential return at the 2028 Games, tacitly backed by Kirsty Coventry, president of the International Olympic Committee. That has triggered alarm in Brussels, where top EU foreign policy officials are currently circulating ideas — from sanctioning athletes to cutting EU funds for sports federations that welcome Russia back — in a bid to slam the door on Russian reintegration, according to a European External Action Service document, dated Sept. 16 and seen by POLITICO.
While the Kremlin’s aggression against Ukraine continues unabated, Russia has nonetheless managed to retain influence at the top of international sports federations, including in chess, fencing and boxing. Moscow has found platforms to advance its soft-power agenda that have rankled Kyiv and European officials, who described how sport has “increasingly become a tool of political instrumentalisation by Russia and Belarus,” in the EEAS memo. Vizer’s IJF, for its part, decried banning Russian athletes from sport, even as Putin was suspended as the honorary president of the organization days after the Kremlin’s tanks rolled over the border into Ukraine.
A mutually beneficial relationship between the Russian elite and international judo long predates the invasion of Ukraine. Under Putin, himself a judoka, it became a social network and loyalty system linking top political and business figures in Russian society. Some of Putin’s closest allies are old friends from Leningrad’s judo circles in the 1960s–80s, forming what one analyst called a “judo brotherhood” or “judocracy” inside Russia, in an essay for Foreign Policy magazine in 2014.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
