Flight ban for Russian tennis ace!
Tennis player Vitalia Diatchenko (32) took part in an ITF tournament in Egypt last week and then wanted to travel from Cairo to the next tournament in France. However, she didn’t get very far.
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The problem: Diatchenko was supposed to fly to Nice via Warsaw with the Polish airline “LOT”. The company didn’t even let the number 250 in the tennis world get on the plane in Cairo. It referred to the restrictions imposed by Warsaw against Russia. “LOT Polish Airlines could not accept any citizen of the Russian Federation on its flight,” said a statement released on Tuesday.
As a reaction to Russia’s ongoing war of aggression in Ukraine, Poland and the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have severely restricted the entry of Russian nationals or only allowed them in exceptional cases.
According to Diatchenko, she was stuck at Cairo airport for 18 hours and as a result had to cancel her planned participation in the tournament on the French island of Corsica.
Since the beginning of the war, the participation of Russian professionals on the tennis tour has repeatedly caused discussions. There was a ban on participation in the traditional tournament in Wimbledon last year. This year, as in almost all other tournaments for a long time, they will also be allowed to start under a neutral flag. Above all, professionals from Ukraine, but also other tennis stars, had repeatedly spoken out in favor of the exclusion of athletes from Russia or Belarus.
Aryna Sabalenka (24), number 2 in the world from Belarus, recently spoke out against the war: “If I could stop the war, I would do it.” players heard on the tour. “A lot of people are pointing at me and some might even hate me. I didn’t do anything, not even against Ukraine. They don’t like me just because I was born in Belarus,” said the Australian Open winner.
2023-04-26 13:25:31
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