Kremlin Uses Olympic Ban as Another Arrow to Shoot at the West

More than 10,500 athletes from some 200 countries will participate in the Olympic Games in Paris, but only 15 of them will be from Russia. They will compete without the accompaniment of the Russian flag or its national anthem.

Back in Russia, the competition will not be shown on television for the first time since 1984. And state TV is paying little attention to the Games, other than to point out flaws in the Games in commentary that smacks of sour grapes.

News segments, for instance, have reported on the cleanup of the Seine, which they concluded would inevitably fill up with sewage again. And media commentators expressed disgust that a drag queen carried the Olympic torch — which is antithetical to Russia’s increasing emphasis on what it calls “traditional values” and its crackdown on L.G.B.T.Q. expression.

It’s quite a comedown for Russia, a traditional Olympic powerhouse that for years used the competition as a way to project power and foster national pride, and often finished first in the final medal count. And it represents the price the country is paying for its invasion of Ukraine two years ago and the daily mayhem it inflicts there.

Banned from participating because of the war, Moscow has chosen to spurn the Games in return. It is framing them as part of the same narrative that President Vladimir V. Putin has used to stoke nationalism at home: that Russia is engaged in an existential standoff with a Western alliance bent on the country’s humiliation.

“No one wants to recognize the real reason for the increased barriers to Russia’s participation,” said Dmitri Navosha, a Belarusian who co-founded a prominent sports website in Russia but has left the country and opposes the invasion of Ukraine. “The reason is the war.” And in Russia, he said, “this fact is simply hidden and interpreted as ‘the West doesn’t like Russia, so they don’t let us go anywhere.’”