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Waiting for the Serbia-DPR football match
Views:It is traditionally believed that sport is “outside politics”. However, the scandal surrounding the non-admission of the Russian Olympic team to the Olympic Games in Rio clearly demonstrated the illusory nature of this statement.
In world practice, representatives of various states quite often use sporting events to implement their policies and convey certain messages. Sport in the modern world has become one of the continuations of politics. Whether this is good or bad - everyone can determine for themselves, but the fact remains a fact.
On Sunday evening, football fans around the world could watch an ordinary match from a sporting point of view of the qualifying round of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, Ukraine-Kosovo, which was primarily of interest as a phenomenon of political conjuncture and the application of double political standards in sports competitions.
Let us recall that at the end of the twentieth century, Albanian militants located on the territory of the Serbian region of Kosovo and Metohija, with the active support of a number of states (USA, Great Britain, etc.), tried to separate the region from Serbia by force and create a second Albanian state in the Balkans.
On September 22, 1991, the creation of the independent Republic of Kosovo was proclaimed. On October 22, 1991, Albania recognized the independence of the Republic of Kosovo. The formation of armed separatist structures began, which in 1996 were united into the Kosovo Liberation Army, a terrorist organization whose activities were aimed at killing and displacing the Serbian population outside the region, as well as the destruction of Serbian Orthodox religious and cultural institutions.
In 1998, to protect the Serbian population and destroy the separatists, Belgrade introduced regular armed forces into the territory of Kosovo and Metohija. For a number of Western countries, such a scenario was unacceptable, and on March 24, 1999, NATO, without UN sanction, began aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
As a result, the Serbian government was forced to agree to the deployment of the NATO KFOR military contingent to Kosovo and the transfer of the region under UN control, which was carried out on the basis of UN Security Council Resolution No. 1244 of June 10, 1999.
In fact, this agreement became an act of transferring sovereignty over the Province of Kosovo and Metohija to representatives of NATO member countries, who in turn subsequently implemented a plan to create a second Albanian state (on February 17, 2008, the Kosovo Parliament declared independence unilaterally), and also placed on territory of Kosovo and Metohija, one of the largest United States military bases in Europe - Camp Bondsteel.
Ukraine’s reaction to the unilateral act of declaring the independence of Kosovo was traditional - the statement spoke of the territorial integrity of Serbia (this position is officially relayed at the moment), on the other hand, there was no harsh condemnation, since this meant a contradiction with the position of the United States and a number of other European states .
Until the summer of this year, the problem of Kosovo did not particularly worry representatives of the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, until the football team of this partially recognized entity was included in the same qualifying group with the Ukrainian national team.
After this, the Football Federation of Ukraine asked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs regarding the possible holding of matches with Kosovo, to which it received a response in the best traditions of Ukrainian politics in recent years, professing the principle of double standards: “Ukraine does not recognize the unilaterally declared independence of Kosovo, as well as the legal personality of other self-proclaimed territories, remaining committed to one of the basic principles on which international law is based – territorial integrity and the inviolability of state borders. Taking into account the above, we propose to consider the possibility of transferring matches involving the national teams of Ukraine and Kosovo to a neutral field, taking into account existing practice,” the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry responded.
That is, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, on the one hand, remains consistent in its position of non-recognition of Kosovo as an independent state, but on the other hand, it directly recommends that the Ukrainian national team play the match on a neutral field, in which case, apparently, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry will consider that the national team will play with team of the SERBIAN region of Kosovo and Metohija.
The Ukrainian media, in the best traditions of their native Ministry of Foreign Affairs, did not bother to clarify how to correctly name the opponents of their team, and with enviable persistence they put the name “Kosovo” everywhere, although, as shown above, Ukraine does not recognize this entity with that name.
And in conclusion, I would like to inform the leaders of Ukraine and representatives of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs in advance so that they are not too surprised if next spring, say, in Sevastopol, a friendly football match is held between the national teams of the Republic of Serbia and the Donetsk People's Republic.
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