EU leaders meet today for their first chance to beef about the budget face to face.
On the show, Zoya Sheftalovich and Sarah Wheaton dive deeper into why leaders look increasingly unlikely to reach an agreement on the EU’s next money pot by December. Plus, Zoya obtained a document revealing deepening relations between Russia and Slovakia. Will that be a cause for concern around the Council table?
Next up, Zoya spoke with Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius on stage yesterday. His main message? Europe should boost its defense capabilities and stop relying so heavily on U.S. military support.
And finally, ECB President Christine Lagarde plugged her upcoming memoir at a press conference … is she allowed to do that?
If you have a question or comment, don’t hesitate! message us on our WhatsApp here or at +32 491 05 06 29.
KYIV — Russia’s bid for reacceptance in world sports is gaining momentum ahead of the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. And nowhere has that been more visible than in President Vladimir Putin’s favorite event: judo.
The martial art is a notable arena for Moscow’s return to international sport. Putin has long-standing ties to judo, and the sport’s governing body has become a leading force in decisions about Russian athletes’ participation.
Austrian-Romanian executive Marius Vizer is the entrepreneur who has helped transform his sport into a global commercial product since he began leading the International Judo Federation in 2007. But to his detractors, he’s a sports official who built a powerful network connecting Putin, Russia’s elites and global business interests, while maintaining the image of a neutral administrator.
“It’s clear that, considering how Vizer promoted the Russians and kept saying they were ‘good for us,’ [he has] definitely interests and connections in Russia. Russia’s ideas are everywhere,” the Ukrainian Judo Federation’s head coach Vitalii Dubrova said in an interview.
The International Judo Federation did not respond to POLITICO’s request for comment on Vizer’s ties to Russia. The IJF also did not make Vizer available to reply to requests for comment.
While the IJF offered solidarity funding for Ukrainian judo in 2022 and instituted background checks on Russian and Belarusian athletes in 2023, in November 2025 it became the first major sports organization to fully reinstate Russian athletes — allowing them to compete under their national flag for the first time since the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022.
It was part of Moscow’s use of sports as a route back onto the global stage, from comebacks in major tournaments to broader Olympic rehabilitation — and a potential return at the 2028 Games, tacitly backed by Kirsty Coventry, president of the International Olympic Committee.
That has triggered alarm in Brussels, where top EU foreign policy officials are currently circulating ideas — from sanctioning athletes to cutting EU funds for sports federations that welcome Russia back — in a bid to slam the door on Russian reintegration, according to a European External Action Service document, dated Sept. 16 and seen by POLITICO.
While the Kremlin’s aggression against Ukraine continues unabated, Russia has nonetheless managed to retain influence at the top of international sports federations, including in chess, fencing and boxing. Moscow has found platforms to advance its soft-power agenda that have rankled Kyiv and European officials, who described how sport has “increasingly become a tool of political instrumentalisation by Russia and Belarus,” in the EEAS memo.
Vizer’s IJF, for its part, decried banning Russian athletes from sport, even as Putin was suspended as the honorary president of the organization days after the Kremlin’s tanks rolled over the border into Ukraine.
“Russia uses propaganda to promote the idea that sport is apolitical, while money and influence help it regain its place in international sport,” Dubrova said.
Putin’s judo brotherhood
A mutually beneficial relationship between the Russian elite and international judo long predates the invasion of Ukraine. Under Putin, himself a judoka, it became a social network and loyalty system linking top political and business figures in Russian society.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, decorates Arkady Rotenberg during an award ceremony for the construction of the 19-kilometer road and rail Crimean Bridge over the Kerch Strait, in Sevastopol, Crimea, on March 18, 2020. | Pool picture by Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images
Some of Putin’s closest allies are old friends from Leningrad’s judo circles in the 1960s–80s, forming what one analyst called a “judo brotherhood” or “judocracy” inside Russia, in an essay for Foreign Policy magazine in 2014.
The judocracy’s influence spread to the top of the sport globally. Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, Putin’s childhood training partners, built construction and infrastructure empires in Russia through major state contracts, including the Crimean Bridge, which Ukraine views as an illegal attempt to connect mainland Russia with the occupied Black Sea peninsula.
In 1998, Arkady Rotenberg took over the Yavara-Neva judo club in St. Petersburg, founded at Putin’s behest when he headed the country’s Federal Security Service. The Russian leader remains its honorary president, while Arkady Rotenberg served on the IJF executive committee from 2013 to 2022.
Vizer became president of the Romanian Judo Federation in 1995, led the European Judo Union from 2000 to 2007 and has headed the IJF since 2007. “Of course, [Vizer and the Rotenbergs] know each other,” former Georgian-Ukrainian judoka Georgii Zantaraia, now chair of the athletes’ commission of the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine, told POLITICO. “Putin was the honorary president of the International Judo Federation … [Vizer] was part of this structure.”
The influence of Vizer as a sports powerbroker became clear in 2019, when world champion Saeid Mollaei said Iranian officials had pressured him to withdraw from the World Championships to avoid facing Israeli judoka Sagi Muki. The IJF suspended Iran and helped Mollaei continue his career abroad after he fled the country.
The spotlight then fell on Vizer’s ties to Putin, who appeared alongside him in Budapest that year. The Russian president held an informal meeting over tea with Vizer and IJF honorary Vice President Sándor Csányi — a symbolic public display of the Russian president’s privileged place within Vizer’s international judo network, reinforcing perceptions of his role as an important political ally.
The EU response
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion started, Vizer has echoed Russian officials and the state-backed Roscongress Foundation in arguing that sport should remain separate from politics, a stance that critics view as tacit backing for Russian aggression.
Though many Russian Olympic athletes are also members of the armed forces, the judo chief has also insisted through his organization that athletes should not be held responsible for governmental actions.
“As sporting events and sport itself promote peace and solidarity worldwide, we consider that those athletes who participate in international sporting events are promoting peace and international solidarity,” the IJF said in early March 2022, while Russian forces closed in on Kyiv. “On this basis, the global decision to sanction all Russian athletes, regardless of the different opinions many have expressed, is not considered to be justified. We cannot condemn the athletes for what is happening.”
Four-and-a-half years on, representatives for Ukrainian athletes argue that restoring Russian competitors and national symbols normalizes Moscow’s ongoing aggression. “The flag came back, and that is what is important for Russia,” said Dubrova.
Ukrainian Sports Minister Matvii Bidnyi told POLITICO in July that the IOC is “effectively functioning as a pressure release valve” for Russia.
“It is up to each International Federation (IF) as the sole authority for its international competitions, outside of the Olympic Games, to decide on this question [restoring Russian athletes’ participation under the Russian flag, emblem and anthem]. For more, we kindly refer you to the IJF,” the IOC said in comments.
The IOC did not address the question about whether it had ever investigated potential Russian political or financial influence on decision-making within the IJF.
The IOC’s deferred decision on flags, anthems and team colors until an unspecified, later moment, “leaves scope for coordinated EU action to prevent the normalisation and political instrumentalisation of sport while the war of aggression continues,” EU officials noted in the Sept. 16 document.
The EU could press sports federations to keep Russian flags, anthems and officials out of competitions, they wrote, and withhold EU grants from bodies that let Moscow’s teams compete under national colors.
A more striking proposal targets the money around major events: EU countries could review where TV-rights revenue flows and use coordinated pressure to deter broadcasters and sponsors from backing competitions that give Russia a platform, the officials wrote.
The options also include visa restrictions for athletes competing under national colors and efforts to bring “like-minded” countries such as Britain, Norway and Switzerland into a wider coalition against Russian reintegration.
As whispers circulate of plague in faraway Siberia, it’s worth remembering that Russian obfuscation is so ingrained that it’s become a meme.
In HBO’s dramatized 2019 series about the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, a Russian atomic scientist scoffs at a radiation reading that suggests a major calamity is taking place.
“Not great, not terrible,” says the fictionalized version of Anatoly Dyatlov, the real-life deputy chief engineer at Chernobyl in April 1986, as he looks at a dosimeter noting 3.6 roentgen per hour, just below a critical radiation level.
Except that reading was not accurate. Not even close. The nuclear reactor had already exploded and unleashed catastrophic levels of radiation that would go on to cause thousands of cancer-related deaths in the worst nuclear power plant disaster in history.
While dramatized, the scene is emblematic of a long-standing Soviet and Russian desire to downplay critical incidents — and even cover them up. That pattern has flared this week, with senior world health officials, the European Union and U.S. President Donald Trump demanding that Moscow be more transparent about a suspected outbreak of plague in far eastern Russia.
In dark comedic twist in the face of the potential plague, Dyatlov’s dismissive remark is now ubiquitous. Not great, not terrible.
Into the unknown
The death of a 28-year-old employee at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia and the Far East last week triggered unease across the globe due to her laboratory work — and a local Russian official linking her death to a case of plague.
Russia was quick to clamp down. Rospotrebnadzor, the country’s national public health agency, said that the employee died from “pneumonia of unknown etiology” and that no microorganisms associated with her work were identified in the patient sample.
Still, Russian health authorities placed nearly 200 people under supervision and local media reported that several hospitals were placed under quarantine. Rospotrebnadzor said Thursday these measures were taken due to “the patient’s professional activities.”
The World Health Organization, which leads global response to international health threats, got in touch with Russian health authorities on Oct. 3. It requested more information using one of the tools laid out in the International Health Regulations, which Russia is signed up to. Under the IHR, countries have 24 hours to respond to the WHO — though Russia sent its response on Oct. 6.
Russian authorities said that “no case of plague had recently been registered in Irkutsk” and “no pathogens of dangerous infectious diseases were detected among any of the contacts.”
World Health Organization epidemic and pandemic management head Maria Van Kerkhove, who said “we still don’t know exactly how this person died, at a press briefing in Geneva on Oct. 7, 2026. | Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images
As of Thursday, Russian health authorities maintain that there is no “epidemic risk” in the region. Rospotrebnadzor said that it had concluded health inspections and found “no emergency situations involving pathogenic microorganisms.” It had also completed monitoring of 90% of the contacts, without identifying any infections, the agency added. Simultaneously, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov slammed media reports about the case as false and said Russia has been communicating with global health authorities.
Yet the WHO insists there’s still much left unknown about the events inside Russia.
“We don’t know exactly how this person died,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, director of epidemic and pandemic management, during a press briefing Wednesday. “We know that she had pneumonia. We know it was a fatal case. We understand that some laboratory tests have been done. They haven’t found the causative agent. This is why we need more information.”
The WHO said it requested further details on what laboratory tests were conducted, which pathogens were evaluated, which further analyses are being done to determine the patient’s cause of death — if not plague — along with more details on any potential lab incident and the 200 contacts.
Until those questions are answered, it’s impossible for the WHO to conduct a risk assessment.
“We don’t yet have the full picture of this event, and we are not able to conduct a full risk assessment,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the organization’s director-general. “Timely, complete, and transparent information sharing under the international regulations is essential to clarify conflicting reports and enable an accurate assessment of potential public health risks.”
Omertà in Russian
It might be that the cause of death of the 28-year-old lab worker is not, in fact, plague.
But Russia’s incomplete, late and hazy communication about the case is fomenting fears and uncertainty from Geneva to Brussels to Washington. It would also not be the first time the Kremlin has downplayed or attempted to cover up public health threats.
That goes beyond the Soviet-era Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster, in what is now northern Ukraine, where the Kremlin was slow to take action and effectively denied the cause of the incident.
In 1979, according to an investigation by U.S. scientists, the Soviet Union covered up a deadly anthrax outbreak in the city of Sverdlovsk, now Yekaterinburg, which killed at least 66 people. Officials said the victims had fallen ill from eating contaminated meat, when in reality they had been exposed to anthrax because of an accident at a secret biological weapons lab.
Russia was also accused of covering up a mysterious 1988 alopecia outbreak in Chernivtsi region, in which more than 175 children lost their hair. Soviet authorities said the children suffered from thallium food poisoning, but later studies raised questions about that, with some suggesting the cause was hydrazine, or acid rain.
Over the years, the Kremlin has also dismissed, downplayed and underreported HIV cases, even while in the middle of a deadly epidemic. And, more recently, during the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia was accused of downplaying coronavirus deaths, particularly at the beginning.
An image taken from a helicopter in April 1986 shows a general view of the destroyed fourth power block of Chernobyl’s nuclear plant a few days after the catastrophe, which was downplayed at the time by Soviet authorities. | Vladimir Repik/AFP via Getty Images
The tradition extends beyond public health. The 1999 apartment block bombings, the 2000 sinking of the Kursk submarine and the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 by Kremlin-backed separatists all raised questions over Russia’s public messaging and commitment to transparency.
Talks with Putin
The EU and the U.S. are monitoring the Irkutsk situation closely, with both seemingly growing impatient with Russia’s communication.
“The whole world is waiting for the information from Russia,” said European Commission spokesperson Eva Hrncirova on Thursday.
“Russia should make information about the plague available as soon as possible,” she told reporters. “We need information from Russia. It’s linked to the Russian membership in the WHO Europe, sharing timely, precise, exact information so that the experts can assess the situation, because [it] can have cross-border implications.”
The European Commission’s directorate-general for health and food safety is planning to send a technical letter to Russia asking for more information, a Commission spokesperson confirmed.
In the meantime, Russia’s “patchy” communication is dangerous, said a Commission official, granted anonymity to speak candidly on the matter.
“This fuels speculation into all directions. It also renders preventive [and] precautionary action difficult, if not even meaningless,” the official said. These types of events happen all the time, but there is usually an exchange with the WHO and health authorities, the person added. “The lack of precise [and] reliable info is logically reducing adequate good preparedness.”
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday urged Russia to share more information, adding that it would be “irresponsible” to speculate until then. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the U.S. sent a formal diplomatic message to Russia requesting more information about the woman’s death and reminding the Kremlin that it has obligations under international law to share information about disease outbreaks in a timely manner.
U.S. President Donald Trump even said Tuesday he had a “call scheduled” with Russian President Vladimir Putin “very soon” to discuss the situation.
But, by Thursday, the two leaders were yet to talk, with Trump noting that Russia was “not saying much.”
Russia’s hybrid attacks across Europe — cyberattacks, sabotage, drone incursions — have been ramping up in recent months. But European governments are quietly preparing for something much worse.
On today’s show, Zoya Sheftalovich and Ian Wishart discuss how EU ambassadors have been meeting in recent weeks to discuss what to do if a potential Russian hybrid attack were to result in mass casualties.
Next, Britain’s minister in charge of relations with Europe, Hamish Falconer, is making his first official visit to the European Parliament. Zoya was able to catch him on the phone to ask him more about EU-U.K. relations under PM Andy Burnham and a potential deal on farming, among other things, currently in the works.
Finally, what may sound like the plot of a spy novel is in fact real news coming out of Berlin where Germany’s former spy chief has been arrested on suspicion of espionage.
Questions? Comments? Let us know on our WhatsApp here or at +32 491 05 06 29.
Spain’s snap election is poised to upend not just domestic politics … but EU politics, too.
On today’s show, Zoya Sheftalovich and Ian Wishart break down the potential impact of the Madrid tumult — from the EU long-term budget to the potential puncturing of Ursula von der Leyen’s fragile majority in Parliament.
Next, Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar is reviewing a huge nuclear deal agreed between ex-leader Viktor Orbán and Russian president Vladimir Putin. Our reporting has found that there could be some serious problems behind the scenes of the project.
Finally, more than 3,000 temporary contract agents have taken an exam in the hopes of becoming permanent officials. But the early results are pretty dismal.
If you like this show, why not check out our new sister podcast, Decoded by POLITICO? The podcast brings you daily updates on how rapid developments in AI are shifting global policy. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Questions? Comments? Let us know on our WhatsApp here or at +32 491 05 06 29.
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