Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Winter Olympics should never have been awarded to Vladimir Putin’s Russia

Last month’s terrorist attacks in Volgograd were doubtless an attempt to warn foreigners off the Winter Olympics in Sochi next month. An attempt, too, to remind Vladimir Putin that his problems in the Caucasus – many of them at least partially made in Moscow – haven’t gone away.

For understandable reasons the bombs have caused plenty of folk to wonder about the security of athletes and visitors in Sochi. Those concerns are, plainly, real even if we may also, I think, expect the Russian state to erect several rings of steel around the Black Sea resort.

The real concern, frankly, is that Russia was awarded the games in the first place. As I’ve written in today’s Scotsman:

The games should never have been sent to Russia in the first place.

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