Canada bars Russian and Belarusian players from world junior hockey championship

Canada will not let Russian or Belarusian ice hockey players compete on its ice, prime minister Mark Carney told reporters on Tuesday, hours after a sports court cleared the way for their return to international competition. The world junior championship opens in Alberta on 26 December, and Carney left no ambiguity about who would be on the rosters.

"While Russia and Belarus are supporting this illegal, unjustified, horrific war in Ukraine, as long as that's going on, there will be none of those athletes competing for their countries in Canada," Carney said.

The ruling that triggered the revolt came from the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which on Friday lifted the ban the International Ice Hockey Federation imposed after Moscow's full-scale invasion in February 2022. The IIHF had extended the ban annually; Russia's federation appealed repeatedly. CAS concluded that safety and security concerns were "not supported by sufficient evidence" — a finding the national federations have spent the week disagreeing with in practice.

On Monday the Finnish Ice Hockey Association asked other nations to stand against the decision. By Tuesday, federations from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Latvia and the Czech Republic had sided with Finland. Norway was first to declare it would play all tournament games except those involving Russia, citing its responsibility for the safety of players, staff and their families. Ukraine's foreign minister Andrii Sybiha thanked the European nations for "refusing to share the ice with Russia" and urged others to go further: deny visas to Russian players. "If CAS lacks a moral compass, let's show that hockey still has values," he posted.

The federations' language is notable for what it avoids: none frames the refusal as solidarity with Ukraine first. All cite security — the one ground a Swiss arbitration court cannot easily second-guess from Lausanne. Meanwhile the sanctions that once spanned trade, energy and finance have thinned; Russian diesel flows again after Washington lifted restrictions. The hockey rink has become one of the few places where isolation of Russia still has enforcement.

That leaves host cities holding the practical problem. The CAS ruling forces each venue to decide whether to stage tournaments as planned if Russian teams enter, and the junior championship in Alberta now begins with the host country's own prime minister having pre-empted the question.

A court in Switzerland ruled the security fears insufficiently evidenced; the countries that would have to host the games have spent the week declining to test that finding in person.