New cold war: Are sanctions against Russian hockey players fair?

As the Velvet Revolution raged in Czechoslovakia against communist one-party rule in 1989, famed hockey goalie Dominik Hasek and teammates squeezed into a Skoda to join pro-independence protests in Prague.

When Washington Capitals left-winger Alex Ovechkin, a Russian, took a far more nuanced stance about his country’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Hasek squared up on Twitter.

He labeled the star puck-handler an “alibist” for refusing to denounce President Vladimir Putin’s claims of a defensive attack, and called for the National Hockey League to expand a growing umbrella of sports sanctions by suspending Russian player contracts. 

Mr. Ovechkin, in particular, is in a vise, not least of which is that he plays at a rink just a stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue from the U.S. Capitol. For one, his decision to call for peace may have put him at odds with new crackdowns on speech back home. Yet he also counts Mr. Putin as a friend – and his Instagram page still boasts a picture of the two men.

Growing sports sanctions underscore the tension between fairness to an individual and a need for collective action in the face of atrocities like the kind occurring in Ukraine, where a children’s and maternity hospital was bombed Wednesday.

“Here we have athletes – including Russian Paralympians – paying the consequences, and that feels atrocious on some level, even immoral,” says Sergey Radchenko, author of “Two Suns in the Heavens: the Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy.” “But on the other hand, Russia has pursued a brutal, immoral war, and so then do you host Russian athletes like nothing is happening? It’s a clash of moralities that’s very hard to reconcile.”

Pressure is growing for leagues to sanction not just Russia, but individual players. Russian athletes have been barred this year from both the Paralympics and the World Cup. The Russian owner of an English Premier League team has seen the club’s sale frozen – and no new tickets can be sold. An international cat association even banned Russian cats.

“I think international hockey should say, ‘We’re not gonna let [Russians] play in the world junior hockey tournament’” this summer, Canadian hockey great Wayne Gretzky said last week in a TNT interview.

George Orwell once called sports “war minus the shooting.” Hockey offers a particularly mythic backdrop. The underdog victory of the U.S. Olympic men’s hockey team against the Soviets at Lake Placid in 1980, after all, is known as the Miracle on Ice.

The NHL features players from the Arctic hockey halo, from Toronto to Kyiv. It has cut business ties to Russian firms. But it has defended its Russian players, adding extra protection because of what the league calls verbal threats and attacks on them.

As the war grinds on in Ukraine, tensions on the ice are mounting. After someone displayed a Ukrainian flag at last Thursday’s Capitals home game, the team banned fans from carrying Ukrainian or Russian flags in the stands. On Wednesday, it issued a statement condemning the Russian invasion and “loss of innocent life.” It also offered its “full support of our Russian players and their families overseas.”

So far, the 41 Russian players in the NHL have remained muted about Russia invading its neighbor. One posted a “No War” poster, with the caption “Stop it!” Carolina Hurricanes forward Andrei Svechnikov toyed with making a public statement, but decided to take more time to think about it. That was last week.

And while Mr. Hasek found Mr. Ovechkin’s comments mealy-mouthed, the younger hockey star did publicly call for peace. 

“Nobody likes the war,” says Daniel Milstein, a Ukrainian-born sports agent who has become a key conduit of Russian and Ukrainian talent into the NHL. It’s not right, he says, to discriminate against an individual player because of their nationality. “Their lives,” he says, “are being threatened.” 

But the case of Mr. Ovechkin is particularly fraught.

While he has argued he is just an athlete with pride of country, Mr. Ovechkin has publicly stumped for Mr. Putin.

In 2017, he started the “Putin Team” ahead of the Russian elections. When he got married, Mr. Putin sent congratulations that were read on Mr. Ovechkin’s wedding day.

That puts Mr. Ovechkin under more pressure to speak out, especially given concerns about players’ families back home in Russia.

“In some ways Ovechkin, precisely because of his ... being such a Putin buddy, has a greater form of freedom here, a greater space of activity, of action,” says Andrei Markovits, co-author of “Gaming the World.”

Sports and stature

Analysts say Mr. Putin sees athletic endeavor as symbolic of Russia’s stature and ambition.

The fall of the Soviet Union hit its sports community hard. In the mid-1990s, an American sports promoter found the remnants of the Red Army team playing in a dingy night club. 

Mr. Putin has worked to resurrect the glory days, using Russian hockey players as backdrops. 

In 2019, he suited up for an “all-star” game featuring former NHL stars Pavel Bure and Slava Fetisov. Mr. Putin reportedly scored eight goals. The Kremlin issued a correction the next day. It claimed Mr. Putin had actually scored 10 goals.

He joins other authoritarian leaders who have come to understand that “the Olympics [and other global sports events] become a form of nationalistic orgy, because it’s such an aphrodisiac, such an unbelievable drug,” says Mr. Markovits, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor.

But that is also what sports organizations are aiming for as they join a global sanctions movement aimed at undermining support for the Ukraine conflict on Russian streets from Novosibirsk to Nizhny Novgorod.

Sports sanctions can work. When South Africans were polled ahead of a 1992 referendum to end apartheid, several questions focused on the country’s athletes being barred from world sports bodies because of their government’s support of a racist system. 

The sanctions created an environment where, as Nelson Mandela once said, South Africa became “the skunk of the world.” 

But this is a different dynamic, says Stuart Kaufman, a political scientist at the University of Delaware in Newark.

“The problem with these kinds of measures is that it wouldn’t affect the awareness of the Russian people very much,” says Mr. Kaufman, author of “Modern Hatreds.” They could also backfire, he says.

Sanctions, he adds, “are potentially relevant as far as building a broader movement, but the only thing that is going to hit Russian public opinion would be if the 2026 Olympics don’t have a Russian hockey team at all. That’s the kind of blunt force symbolic measure that would be needed.”

At least one Russian, however, says that sanctions against Russian athletes “may change the calculus” of how Russians perceive the war – and their support for it.

“I am in deep opposition to Putin, but at the same time, as a Russian, I realize that sanctions are applied to all of Russia, so I then reap the consequences of the government’s actions,” says Mr. Radchenko, in a phone interview from London. “Whether it’s fair or not, it’s hard to avoid.”