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Ukraine’s sports chief slammed the International Olympic Committee for ushering Russian athletes back into the fold even as Moscow continues to wage its war on Ukraine.

The IOC announced last week it had “provisionally lifted the suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee,” ending a ban that has been in place since the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the winter of 2022 and paving the way for Russian athletes to return to the Games.

Ukrainian Sports Minister Matviy Bidnyi said in an interview that the IOC is “effectively functioning as a pressure release valve” for Russia.

“Why now? I have no answer on this question. I can’t see any reason for it,” said Bidnyi, a former bodybuilder. “Undermining the collective pressure that the international community has been building against the aggressor … it’s not a very honorable role for this organization.”

The IOC said that the reversal did not represent any change in its view of Russia’s war in Ukraine, which it still condemns. However, it said the ban was relaxed because the Russian committee removed regional sports organizations ​from Russia-occupied Ukrainian territories from its membership, which was the reason it was sanctioned.

Bidnyi said the IOC had fallen for a “primitive legal trick” and that Russia had simply restructured its Olympic committee to circumvent the IOC’s ban.

“We do not believe the IOC fails to understand this,” he said. “This is a deliberate decision to ignore reality, which completely ruins their own credibility.”

Moscow has repeatedly used international sport to maintain a foothold in Western institutions despite its broader diplomatic isolation since the war in Ukraine began. That has included influencing the world of chess , international fencing and lobbying for the gradual return of Russian athletes to global competitions .

European sport ministers have also reacted with anger to the IOC’s decision, with ministers from nine countries — Sweden, Estonia, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Finland and Denmark — calling for the EU to cut funding for the Olympics.

Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal told POLITICO in a statement that sport and politics cannot be separated, as “Russia continues to use sport as an instrument of state propaganda.”

“We should not pretend that sport exists in a vacuum separate from the brutal, ongoing war,” he said. “A return to business as usual would send the wrong message: It would disregard the suffering of the Ukrainian people and risk normalising Russia’s aggression.”

The IOC has not yet decided on whether the Russian flag and national anthem will be allowed at future Olympic events, including the Los Angeles Summer Olympics in 2028.

But Bidnyi said the IOC’s decision had already encouraged other sports governing bodies, such as the International Handball Federation, to relax their bans on Russian athletes.

“We can see the consequences of it [the IOC’s decision],” he said. “Our diplomatic work became much more difficult.”

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Russia’s economy is creaking ever more loudly as the cost of financing a fifth year of war continues to mount.

The latest sign of strain is a standoff between the Ministry of Finance, which has to raise the money to pay for the war, and the country’s largest banks, which are demanding ever-higher rates to finance it.

The Ministry of Finance said on Monday it would suspend bond sales after a series of auctions failed to attract buyers at the yields local banks were willing to offer. Government bond yields range between 13 and 17 percent currently, but may fall a little next week if the Central Bank of the Russian Federation cuts its key rate when it meets on Friday.

The central bank has had to keep interest rates painfully high to keep a lid on inflation, at a time when the budget deficit is widening sharply. Its key rate currently stands at 14.25 percent.

Businesses typically have to pay well above that rate for credit, and things aren’t made easier by the Kremlin competing for the same, limited pool of savings.

Moscow had originally budgeted to cut military spending this year, Janis Kluge, an analyst with the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said. Instead, it has ballooned and accounted for nearly half of government spending in the second quarter, he estimates.

Kluge said the bond market standoff doesn’t herald any imminent collapse, but is consistent with other signs of strain in Russia’s financial markets. The benchmark stock index , dominated for years by the oil and gas industry, has fallen 30 percent in the last two months as Ukraine has shown its ability to hit important economic infrastructure as far afield as Omsk in Siberia.

Ukraine has broadened its drone offensive in spectacular fashion during that time. In addition to the refinery attacks that have caused long lines for fuel up and down the country, its armed forces claim to have struck 183 ships in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, severely disrupting Russia’s attempts to resupply a beleaguered Crimea with fuel, as well as hampering its exports of grain to world markets.

Wild fires

But even that has been overshadowed by attacks in recent days on the fulfillment centers of Wildberries , Russia’s biggest e-commerce company and an essential part of the supply chain for thousands of small businesses.

The attacks destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of goods temporarily held in two warehouses, one outside Moscow and another near Tambov, unleashing a flood of emotional posts on social media from entrepreneurs whose businesses depended on them. POLITICO was unable to independently verify the videos.

“The Wildberries warehouse at Elektrostal has burned down, and we’ve suffered enormous losses,” said one. A single mother currently temporarily saddled with both rent and mortgage obligations as she waits for builders to hand over the apartment she has paid for, she added that she would now struggle to meet accommodation costs of over $3,000 a month.

For Ukrainian drone forces commander Robert Brovdi, the value of goods destroyed wasn’t the key issue. “It’s about shattering, in a single moment, the illusion of a comfortable, peaceful life for the obedient biomass of the aggressor state,” Brovdi said via X . “A delicious punch right into the most sensitive comfort zone of the average bearer of the ‘traditional values’ and Putin lover.”

While Wildberries is overwhelmingly a civilian operation, its online marketplace has listed various dual-use items such as body armor, drones and night vision equipment. As such, Ukraine’s government deemed it a legitimate target — all the more so since Russia has been targeting similar logistic centers in Ukraine for months.

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NISAR’s L-Band Radar Reveals ‘Hummingbird’ in Antarctica

PIA26617

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NASA/JPL-Caltech

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NISAR’s L-Band Radar Reveals ‘Hummingbird’ in Antarctica

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Data from the Earth-orbiting U.S.-India NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite’s L-band radar was used to produce an image of Nunatak Zaterjavshijsja — a mountaintop in East Antarctica — poking out amid a stream of ice flowing northeast to the ocean. The obstruction causes stresses in the ice, heavily fracturing the surrounding surfaces with deep cracks, called crevasses, which show as sharp green lines in the image. Produced in August 2025, the image has been nicknamed “the hummingbird” by NISAR scientists.

The colors show differences in the way polarized microwave signals, which vibrate in different directions, interact with and reflect from the ice. Over Antarctica, NISAR transmits radar waves toward Earth with a horizontal polarization. The orientation of the signals that return, either horizontal, vertical, or both, provide clues about the object or surface that reflected them.

Signals that come back with a horizontal polarization likely bounced off a more regular surface, such as smooth ice. Those signals appear magenta in the image. Signals that return with vertical polarization may have refracted as they partially penetrated the ice or scattered at different angles as they reflected off irregular surfaces, like the faces of crevasses. Called volume scattering, these observations are displayed in green.

The white represents areas in which both magenta and green signals scatter back strongly, a possible indication that there is an equal blend of surface and volume scattering.

Figure A

Figure A is an annotated version of image.

Managed by Caltech, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory leads the United States component of the project and provided the satellite’s L-band SAR and antenna reflector. The spacecraft bus and its S-band SAR were provided by the Indian Space Research Organisation. The NISAR satellite is the first to carry two SAR instruments at different wavelengths, collecting data using the spacecraft’s giant drum-shaped reflector , which measures 39 feet (12 meters) wide — the largest radar antenna reflector NASA has ever sent into space.

To learn more about NISAR, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/nisar/

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