MOSCOW, May 31. /TASS/. The prevailing majority of the international community supports the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) recommendations with regard to Russian and Belarusian athletes competing internationally, IOC President Thomas Bach said on Wednesday.

"The overwhelming majority of the international community understands this challenging situation in sports and supports our middle-ground approach," Bach said speaking at the General Session of the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations (ASOIF).

"This has been expressed by many statements from the overwhelming majority of the NOCs [National Olympic Committees] and also by many statements of political leaders on the level of the United Nations, intergovernmental organizations and heads of state and government," the IOC chief noted.

"The most recent example is the G7 Summit in Hiroshima Japan," Bach stressed.

On May 19, leaders of G7 member states said in their statement at the summit in Japan that they supported the autonomy of sports and were against allowing athletes from Russia and Belarus to participate in international competition under the flags of their countries.

"This is exactly our position," the IOC chief continued. "This is our position defending the autonomy of sport.

"This is our position to establish these strict recommendations to ensure the neutrality of athletes with a Russian or a Belarusian passport," Bach added.

"Everybody knows that such an extremely complex political problem cannot have an easy solution. Only populists pretend to have easy solutions for the most complex problems in the world. We can see today, unfortunately, where the simple solutions are leading to," the IOC president stated.

At its session on January 25, 2023, the IOC (the International Olympic Committee) Executive Board put forward a proposal to permit individual athletes from Russia and Belarus to take part in international sports tournaments, but only under certain conditions.

Athletes from the countries in question should not be "actively supporting" Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine and must compete under a neutral status. Russia and Belarus were also banned from participating in international team events.

Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) President Stanislav Pozdnyakov called these recommendations absolutely unacceptable as they would lead to a split in Russian sports. Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov slammed the IOC’s recommendations as discriminatory.

IOC’s ban on Russia’s international participation

On February 28, 2022, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) issued recommendations to international sports federations to bar athletes from Russia and Belarus from taking part in international tournaments, citing Moscow’s special military operation in Ukraine as the reason.

Following the IOC’s recommendations in late February 2022, the majority of global sports federations decided to bar athletes from Russia and Belarus from all international sports tournaments.