Belarus vs Switzerland

Just as it was in the 2020 UEFA Euro qualifying campaign, the group stage will decide 20 of the 23 teams that will advance to the final tournament, with the top ...

State opposition leads to prison while the national team plays all games away from home due to the nation's support of Russia.

In the penal colony Ivulin was forced to wear the yellow tag of a political detainee. Ivulin is now free and aiming to continue his journalism outside the country, where it would be too dangerous to return. The use of blacklists sidelining players with political views that are deemed unacceptable is, according to Ivulin and others in the country’s media, an open secret. A new host will need to be found but, beyond the Serbs, Belarus find themselves short of allies. “I was on my way to meet a friend, listening to music; the next thing I know I’m down on the ground, face in the tarmac, being arrested,” he says of his initial detention. Uefa says it is monitoring the situation and “further decisions may be taken as necessary”. The ripples spread elsewhere: when the Rukh Brest coach Kiryl Alshevsky said the words “Strength to Sasha Ivulin” in a post-match press conference, he quickly found himself out of a job. Ivulin says that, in one case, a girl who brought balloons with the numbers “two” and “five” to a match was briefly held by police. “Some of the things that happened to them were brutal,” Ivulin says. He was incarcerated in a penal colony on the most spurious of charges, never knowing exactly when he would be freed and watching in horror as another journalist, Katsyaryna Andreeva, saw her punishment extended by eight years. “Sport reflects the situation in any country,” says Aliaksandr Ivulin, a journalist and former player for the Minsk-based club FC Krumkachy. But they have not been barred from competing, unlike the state to which Belarus is essentially a vassal, and few think the governing body has gone far enough.