The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is paving the way for Russian athletes to attend next year's Summer Games in Paris.

Nobody can be surprised.

With their own “unifying task, especially in these times of war”, it is taken for granted that only those Russian athletes who “actively support” the war should not be worthy of Olympic honors.

What that means?

Stays open.

For real?

If Putin's salaried employees in Russia's sports elite, soldiers in tracksuits, members of the invading army who practice top-level sports should have been excluded, the IOC would have worded it that way.

But it hasn't.

Instead, the talk is of "war in Ukraine" and not of "war against Ukraine" and certainly not of "invasion", "attack" or even the suffering of Ukrainian athletes.

By December, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, 180 of them had died, killed by war-mongering members of the invading army.

The IOC captions its statement "Solidarity with Ukraine" and does not mention the victims, whether athletes or not, with a syllable.

Nobody should be surprised by this.

The 2014 Sochi Winter Games ended, Putin robbed Crimea, the Paralympics began, then the killing began in Donbas.

The IOC remained silent.

The Russian cheating program, doping and its cover-up, was exposed, but Russian athletes have competed at all the Olympic Games since then.

Russian sport is an essential arm of state power.

In individual cases, almost exclusively individual athletes, mostly not living in Russia, critical athletes publicly emancipate themselves from the role intended for them.

But that doesn't change anything in principle, and certainly not in relation to the Olympics, because it's exactly this event that Putin has been aiming for with sport since he took office.

In his world, the claim to glorify the Russian nation in the sports arena and destroy the livelihoods of Ukrainian civilians go hand in hand.

In Putin's world, an athlete is a supporter of his policies, and there is no room for doubt.

But the IOC leaves a place for Putin's politics in its Olympic world, as it has given place to the politics of despots and warlords time and again in its history.

Olympic Games as a contribution to a peaceful world is an illusion promoted by the IOC.

With the decision to pave the way for Russian athletes to Paris, the IOC has once again contributed to ensuring that this remains the case.