Russia still wields huge influence inside Ceferin’s Uefa despite bans | Philippe Auclair

Uefa’s response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine could not have been swifter. Hours after the fighting had started in Luhansk, European football’s governing body convened an extraordinary meeting of its executive committee and, three days later, on 28 February 2022, Uefa, with Fifa, announced that all Russian clubs and national teams had been banned from their competitions until further notice.

Under-17 male and female teams were allowed back in September 2023, on condition they compete without their national kit, flag or anthem, only to be banned again after a dozen member associations threatened a boycott.

The Russian men’s senior side have played friendlies – over which Uefa has no jurisdiction – with two European teams (unsurprisingly, Belarus and Serbia) but Russia remains a pariah in the European and world game and will not take part in the 2026 World Cup after Uefa and Fifa agreed in November to keep them out of the tournament’s qualifiers.

As hardly anyone noticed or chose to highlight, Russia has retained its presence within Uefa because its federation, the Russian Football Union, has not been suspended. This has allowed Russian officials, all approved by Vladimir Putin’s regime, to gain or retain positions in the confederation’s committees, including those overseeing Uefa’s club and national team competitions in which their country’s teams cannot take part.

This is not the legacy of a previous term that is yet to come to an end, the hangover of a time when Ukrainians did not live in constant fear of Russian bombs raining on their power stations, homes, schools and hospitals. Almost every individual in question was picked or co-opted by Uefa’s executive committee in 2023, more than a year after the invasion and the Bucha massacre. Their appointments will not be reviewed until their mandates expire in 2027 and this is how Russia, the aggressor, finds itself with a larger number of representatives within Uefa – 14 – than Ukraine, its victim, which has four fewer.

Two of these Ukrainians, Oleksandr Kadenko and Oleksiy Mykhaylychenko, have to work alongside Russian counterparts within their respective committees (grassroots and national team competitions). The Russian Polina Yumasheva, who sits on the governance and compliance committee, was still married to the Kremlin’s “favourite industrialist”, the billionaire oligarch Oleg Deripaska, when first given that position. She is the daughter of Valentin Yumashev, who remained an adviser to President Putin until after Ukraine was attacked.

Bizarre as this will seem, this is nowhere as problematic as the identity of Russia’s main representative at the very heart of Uefa. Alexander Dyukov sits on the executive committee alongside the controversial former Ukrainian FA president, Andriy Pavelko.

Dyukov, a former president of Zenit, is a close ally of the Putin regime; in fact, one of its pillars in his role as chair of the management board of the Russian state’s giant energy company Gazprom Neft, the former main partner of Uefa’s Champions League, whose sponsorship of the tournament was cancelled immediately after the invasion.

The links between Dyukov and the Kremlin are so close that Gazprom recruited its own private army, named Potok (“The Stream”), mostly made up of its own security agents, which remains deployed on the Ukrainian front and took part in the brutal battle of Bakhmut in 2022 and 2023.

Gazprom and Potok have been the subject of international sanctions because of their direct involvement in Russia’s military campaign. Sanctions have been imposed on Dyukov by the United States, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, but there has been no apparent cooling in his relationship with Uefa’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, whom, according to interviews given to Russian media, he hopes to invite to a game of the Russian men’s national team on its own soil this year.

Dyukov did not take part in the vote that led to his country’s teams being banned in 2022, but was in Lisbon the following year, only a shout away from the table where the Ukrainian delegation was sitting, to applaud when Ceferin was acclaimed without opposition to another four-year term. The Slovenian had Russia’s full support when he put his name forward to succeed Michel Platini as Uefa’s president in 2016 and still does.

Dyukov will take a step back when Uefa holds its congress in Belgrade on 3 April. Despite being re-elected as head of the Russia Football Union a month ago, he decided not to seek an extension to his tenure in Uefa’s “council of ministers”. Did he fear the people who had supported his candidacy in 2021 would turn against him and cause Russia a very public humiliation? Several Uefa insiders all said that would not have been the case. Dyukov will still be involved in the confederation’s deliberations, because he will not stand down from his national associations and club competition committee assignments.

It says a lot about the sensitive nature of European football politics and alliances that Russia’s continued influence within Uefa has never been the subject of debate since the ban on its teams was imposed and will not be addressed again in Belgrade. But then, Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, Russia’s staunchest ally alongside Belarus, was the least likely place where European football could discuss the bear in the room.

Uefa was sent a list of detailed questions about the continued presence of Russian officials, Dyukov in particular, in the confederation’s committees and, more generally, about Uefa’s policy towards Russia. They replied: “As you are hopefully aware by now, our position on these topics has been consistently clear and has been communicated frequently. We have no further comment to provide.”

Uefa did not, however, indicate what those statements by the organisation on the subject actually said.