Judo opens door for Russia's return to international sports

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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.

“It’s clear that, considering how Vizer promoted the Russians and kept saying they were ‘good for us,’ [he has] definitely interests and connections in Russia. 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.

“Russia uses propaganda to promote the idea that sport is apolitical, while money and influence help it regain its place in international sport,” Dubrova said.

Putin’s judo brotherhood

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.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, decorates Arkady Rotenberg during an award ceremony for the construction of the 19-kilometer road and rail Crimean Bridge over the Kerch Strait, in Sevastopol, Crimea, on March 18, 2020. | Pool picture by Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images

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.

The judocracy’s influence spread to the top of the sport globally. Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, Putin’s childhood training partners, built construction and infrastructure empires in Russia through major state contracts, including the Crimean Bridge , which Ukraine views as an illegal attempt to connect mainland Russia with the occupied Black Sea peninsula.

In 1998, Arkady Rotenberg took over the Yavara-Neva judo club in St. Petersburg, founded at Putin’s behest when he headed the country’s Federal Security Service. The Russian leader remains its honorary president, while Arkady Rotenberg served on the IJF executive committee from 2013 to 2022.

Vizer became president of the Romanian Judo Federation in 1995, led the European Judo Union from 2000 to 2007 and has headed the IJF since 2007. “Of course, [Vizer and the Rotenbergs] know each other,” former Georgian-Ukrainian judoka Georgii Zantaraia, now chair of the athletes’ commission of the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine, told POLITICO. “Putin was the honorary president of the International Judo Federation … [Vizer] was part of this structure.”

The influence of Vizer as a sports powerbroker became clear in 2019, when world champion Saeid Mollaei said Iranian officials had pressured him to withdraw from the World Championships to avoid facing Israeli judoka Sagi Muki. The IJF suspended Iran and helped Mollaei continue his career abroad after he fled the country.

The spotlight then fell on Vizer’s ties to Putin, who appeared alongside him in Budapest that year. The Russian president held an informal meeting over tea with Vizer and IJF honorary Vice President Sándor Csányi — a symbolic public display of the Russian president’s privileged place within Vizer’s international judo network, reinforcing perceptions of his role as an important political ally.

The EU response

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion started, Vizer has echoed Russian officials and the state-backed Roscongress Foundation in arguing that sport should remain separate from politics, a stance that critics view as tacit backing for Russian aggression.

Though many Russian Olympic athletes are also members of the armed forces, the judo chief has also insisted through his organization that athletes should not be held responsible for governmental actions.

“As sporting events and sport itself promote peace and solidarity worldwide, we consider that those athletes who participate in international sporting events are promoting peace and international solidarity,” the IJF said in early March 2022, while Russian forces closed in on Kyiv. “On this basis, the global decision to sanction all Russian athletes, regardless of the different opinions many have expressed, is not considered to be justified. We cannot condemn the athletes for what is happening.”

Four-and-a-half years on, representatives for Ukrainian athletes argue that restoring Russian competitors and national symbols normalizes Moscow’s ongoing aggression. “The flag came back, and that is what is important for Russia,” said Dubrova.

Ukrainian Sports Minister Matvii Bidnyi told POLITICO in July that the IOC is “effectively functioning as a pressure release valve” for Russia.

“It is up to each International Federation (IF) as the sole authority for its international competitions, outside of the Olympic Games, to decide on this question [restoring Russian athletes’ participation under the Russian flag, emblem and anthem]. For more, we kindly refer you to the IJF,” the IOC said in comments.

The IOC did not address the question about whether it had ever investigated potential Russian political or financial influence on decision-making within the IJF.

The IOC’s deferred decision on flags, anthems and team colors until an unspecified, later moment, “leaves scope for coordinated EU action to prevent the normalisation and political instrumentalisation of sport while the war of aggression continues,” EU officials noted in the Sept. 16 document.

The EU could press sports federations to keep Russian flags, anthems and officials out of competitions, they wrote, and withhold EU grants from bodies that let Moscow’s teams compete under national colors.

A more striking proposal targets the money around major events: EU countries could review where TV-rights revenue flows and use coordinated pressure to deter broadcasters and sponsors from backing competitions that give Russia a platform, the officials wrote.

The options also include visa restrictions for athletes competing under national colors and efforts to bring “like-minded” countries such as Britain, Norway and Switzerland into a wider coalition against Russian reintegration.