Don't ask Ukrainian athletes to shake hands with Russians

Olga Kharlan, a Ukrainian sabre fencing star, faced off last week against Anna Smirnova, a Russian, and roundly and fairly defeated her. The scandal is what happened next.

Like most Ukrainian athletes these days, Kharlan refused to shake hands with her Russian opponent, to show that Russia’s genocidal war of aggression cannot be ignored, even in sport. Kharlan held out her blade instead, inviting Smirnova to tap it — a gesture that substituted for a handshake during the COVID-19 pandemic and ought to suffice.

Smirnova, who in photographs seems to support Russia’s invasion, opted to turn the situation into theater. For 45 minutes, she stayed on the piste, eventually sitting on a chair provided for her. The International Fencing Federation was impressed — it disqualified Kharlan and advanced Smirnova to the next round.

This decision, whether technically justified or not, is outrageous. "The soldiers of Russia are killing our people, the kids, stealing kids as well, kidnapping, so you cannot act normal,” said Elina Svitolina, a Ukrainian who’s one of the world’s top tennis players, in support of Kharlan. Svitolina, who comes from Odesa, which Russia has bombed with ferocity in recent weeks, also refuses to shake hands with her Russian and Belarusian opponents.

Sport, it’s often been said, is humanity’s way to sublimate violent conflict — "war without shooting,” as George Orwell put it. Events like the Olympics are meant to transcend politics. But can sports — or anything, really — ever really be apolitical or amoral?

As Svitolina points out, Russia and Belarus — like the Soviet Union during the Cold War and other countries — use their athletes as part of their propaganda. The same is often true of artists and other cultural ambassadors. That’s why the Munich Philharmonic orchestra fired its celebrity conductor, Valery Gergiev, for example. Gergiev is Russian and had refused to condemn the invasion launched by his friend, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Nationality alone, of course, must never become a moral label or verdict on an individual. That’s a basic principle of liberalism as well as intuitive fairness. Collective punishment — what the Germans vividly call sippenhaft, "clan liability” — is as vile as the atrocities a clan may have committed.

Ukraine acknowledges this logic. After Russia’s invasion, it prohibited athletes representing Ukraine as a nation from competing against Russians. Some had to sit out tournaments in judo, wrestling, chess and other sports. Just before Kharlan and Smirnova were to draw sabers, however, Ukraine changed its policy. Now its athletes are only barred from facing opponents who represent Russia or Belarus, not those of their citizens who, like Smirnova, compete as individuals.

This feels right. It’s also why nobody, in Ukraine or anywhere, should shun the members of the punk band Pussy Riot, tennis player Andrei Rublev or any Russian who does speak out against Putin’s aggression and atrocities. On the contrary, in dictatorships conscientious opposition to your own government requires extraordinary courage and deserves respect.

Lack of such valor, however all-too-human, doesn’t absolve anybody, though, in Russia today or anywhere at any time. When the Americans de-nazified their sector of West Germany after the Third Reich, they distinguished among major offenders, offenders, lesser offenders, followers and the exonerated. Only the minority in the latter group could honestly say they had done the right thing. By contrast, the huge numbers of followers — mitlaufer, literally those who "run alongside” — shared a special form of guilt, because they enabled the evil committed by others.

Nobody can therefore blame Holocaust survivors or other victims of the Nazis for refusing to shake the hand of a German mitlaufer. In the same way, nobody — and certainly not the International Fencing Federation — has the right to censure, disqualify or otherwise frown on Ukrainians today who refuse to shake with Russians.

As a gesture, shaking hands is a recent phenomenon in human history. It probably evolved as a way of demonstrating peaceful intentions by extending a right hand that wasn’t holding a weapon or as a sign of forming a bond by clasping. Ukrainian athletes will be forgiven for finding neither symbolism fitting, as Russians bomb and terrorize their Ukrainian friends and relatives at home.

The person who should have been disqualified, if she hadn’t already been defeated, was Smirnova, for making a spectacle out of the conviction and integrity of her opponent. This week "we realized that the country that terrorizes our country, our people, our families, also terrorizes sports,” Kharlan later said. "I didn’t want to shake this athlete’s hand and I acted with my heart.” In my book, that’s its own kind of victory.