EuroLeague to move all games on Russian soil to other venues

By Selcuk Bugra Gokalp

ANKARA (AA) - The Turkish Airlines EuroLeague will temporarily relocate matches scheduled to be played in Russia to other venues outside that country, according to a statement on Friday.

Games involving Russian teams scheduled to be played outside Russia will continue to be played as scheduled, said a joint statement by the 18 teams competing in the basketball competition.

The organization also suspended the CSKA Moscow vs. Barcelona game that was scheduled to be played on Sunday, said the statement, which was released a day after Russia launched a military intervention in Ukraine.

It underlined that EuroLeague Basketball would continue to monitor the situation and make any changes to these decisions if needed.

EuroLeague and the participating clubs strongly condemned "any acts of war as the ones that are sadly happening in Ukraine."

- Donbas crisis and Russia's military intervention

Ukraine's February 2014 "Maidan revolution" caused President Viktor Yanukovych to flee the country and a pro-Western government to come to power. Russia then illegally annexed Crimea, and separatists in eastern Ukraine declared their so-called administrations of Donetsk and Luhansk, both home to large ethnic Russian populations.

Deadly clashes broke out between Russian-backed separatist forces and the Ukrainian army. The 2014 and 2015 Minsk agreements, signed in Moscow with the intervention of Western powers, sought to stop the conflict but cease-fire violations continued, resulting in some 14,000 deaths as of February.

Late last year, Russia made headlines by deploying tens of thousands of its troops on the border with Ukraine, with the US accusing it of gearing up for an invasion -- claims Moscow denied. Amid threats of Western sanctions, Moscow recognized the separatist administrations in Donbas earlier this week and launched a military operation in Ukrainian territory on Thursday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said the operation's aim was to protect people "subjected to genocide" by Kyiv and to "demilitarize and denazify" Ukraine. He called on the Ukrainian army to lay down its arms.