Kuleba: Anna Smirnova lost the fair competition and decided to play dirty with the handshake show. Olha Kharlan won the fair competition and showed dignity. I urge @FIE_fencing to restore Kharlan’s rights and allow her to compete.

10 comments

1. FIE is a disgrace for rewarding the Russian’s political stunt.

2. It’s ok, Olha won fair and square, everyone knows. Russians trying to force people to shake their hands as if they are civilised people, as always. Always trying to look like the victim.

   If it were my country raping and murdering, I’d bow my head in shame.

3. I read online that shaking hands is part of the rules and you can be DQ’d for not doing it … seems weird

4. I fail to understand how any international sports authorities are allowing Russians to compete in anything. Ban all Russian athletes as long as Russia occupies Ukraine. Otherwise, they are complicit with genocide.

5. Good for Olha taking this stand (and winning fair and square).

   Missing quote from Kuleba’s tweet: “This is exactly how Russian army fights on battlefield”

6. What a total lack of awareness from judges, to kick out someone who’s only “crime” was to not shake hands with someone who, regardless of the flag flown, is a citizen of a nation, CURRENTLY attempting to murder her friends & family.

   A game is worth giving up when the judges have no concept of the hurt you are going through.

   I come from a Jewish family in France during WW2. After the war, some family friends would refuse service to Germans and when questioned, they just rolled up their sleeves and that shut everyone up. The subsequent generations are able to move on and we have friends, partners and even family in Germany, but when you’re living under the inhumanity of a nation, you can’t just be friends with them.

   Just because a russian can play under a different flag, it doesn’t mean they’re no longer russian playing for russia. It’s just white washing the issue.

7. It’s the German Nazis all over again. Thinking they are a superior race.

8. Russians literally are killing Ukraine athletes, their competitors, and the ones who still compete have to show them respect? Idiocracy

9. For the World Cup officials to not understand that the Ukrainian fencer wasn’t competing for personal glory, but for her entire nation, shows a complete lack and understanding and empathy for the human condition. She wasn’t competing for herself, but for the dozens of friends and family members she knew and loved in her country who were being brutally slaughtered on a daily basis by the relatives and friends of her opponent. At that moment all of Ukraine was watching and judging her behavior and she acted in the same way I would have acted if I’d been in that situation. She can go back to Ukraine with her head held high. For the Russian fencer, to act sullen and wounded, to refuse to bump sabers instead of shaking hands with Harlan as she offered, showed a complete lack of empathy for the position Harlan was in. Then to lodge a formal complaint and get Harlan black carded was a d*ck move, typical of the type of behavior the Russians have showed since the beginning of the war. The Russian player lost and should have simply walked away with honor from a match well fought, instead of attacking the Harlan.

   No one can expect someone whose husband, the man she love, on the front lines of eastern Ukraine fighting for his life against the Russians, to shake hands with a member of the Russian team. It would have been slap in the face to her husband. Below is an are some lines I borrowed from an article in the Washington Post.

   https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/ukraine-war-anniversary-families-frontline/

   “They said goodbye at the Ukrainian-Slovak border, hugging and kissing and telling one another the war would be short. A year later — the conflict still dragging on — the lives of Andrii Mishchenko and Olha Taranova have veered apart to a degree they never planned.

   “Andrii, 39, has been performing some of the Ukrainian military’s riskiest reconnaissance work on the front lines of eastern Ukraine. His wife, Olha, 45, has been adjusting with their daughter to life in small-town Germany.

   “He’s lost as much as 18 pounds from the stress and intensity. She’s taken to sleeping with one of his old T-shirts under her pillow.

   “He tries to send her a heart emoji every morning, a way to let her know he’s still alive. And she has so come to depend on those messages that they can determine whether she is upbeat or in shambles when she walks out the door.”

10. Ban the Russian war criminals, including their fencing propagandist.