A truce in the war in Ukraine during the FIFA World Cup, from November 20 to December 18. This is the idea that Gianni Infantino put forward on Tuesday. The FIFA President assured that sport could play a peacemaking role. “My appeal to all of you is to consider a temporary month-long ceasefire for the duration of the World Cup,” he said at a luncheon for G20 leaders. gathered on the Indonesian island of Bali.
Vladimir Putin is conspicuously absent from this gathering of the leaders of the major economies of the planet where Russia is represented by its head of diplomacy Sergei Lavrov.
In the absence of a truce, the sports manager, who had been decorated by the head of the Kremlin after the 2018 World Cup, raised the possibility of “humanitarian corridors where anything that could lead to the resumption of dialogue”. Infantino praised the unifying role of football, recalling that Russia hosted the 2018 World Cup and that Ukraine was a candidate to host the competition in 2030 along with Spain and Portugal.
“We are not naive”
“We are not so naive as to think that football can solve the world’s problems,” he conceded. But the World Cup offers a unique platform, with an estimated audience of five billion spectators, giving an “opportunity to do everything possible to end all conflicts”, he pleaded.