Gazprom-Rusvelo UAE Tour

[Karvalo]

TotalEnergies is so far refusing to offload their enormous Russian oil and gas holdings during a war which is at least partly about Russian control of oil and gas fields. I believe that team should be suspended immediately until they get a new sponsor or Total changes course.

[usr]

Personally I think having someone like Sivakov out there racing not under a Russian flag and coming out in public with voluntary, uncoerced anti war statements is a more powerful message.

Sure. So then you start a thought police operation determining case by case who is allowed and who not? If he is genuinely against the war he will understand why he is getting inconvenienced in reaction to the war. Sucks being a Russian these days, non matter what side you're on.

Perhaps Russians outside can eventually organize an alternative identity to Putinism, kind of like DeGaulle vs Pétain, but I don't think that this has ever happened on an aggressor side. Diaspora Germans didn't succeed in doing so when they had twelve years (and a much stronger cause, at least as long as you don't do the maths of what Putin's nuclear posturing *really* means), but that was in a time when long distance communication was still mostly by letter

[Karvalo]

Personally I think having someone like Sivakov out there racing not under a Russian flag and coming out in public with voluntary, uncoerced anti war statements is a more powerful message.

Sure. So then you start a thought police operation determining case by case who is allowed and who not?

No, I wouldn't.

Look, if all the Russians do get banned I'm not going to lose any sleep about it. But don't kid yourself that it's helping anyone - especially if you're not also immediately banning Peter Sagan and his team until their main sponsor declares they will stop doing billions and billions of dollars worth of business with the Russian state.

[uraqt]

Argument over !! : )

https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/07/sport/iv ... index.html