Russian athletes have appeared at 1,673 international competitions through October this year, Sports Minister Mikhail Degtyarev told President Vladimir Putin at a Kremlin meeting on Thursday, up from 1,148 across all of 2025. The Russian national anthem has been played 380 times at world and European championships over the same period, according to Degtyarev’s briefing.

The figures were delivered to a meeting of Russia’s Council for the Development of Physical Culture and Sports, chaired by Putin at the Kremlin on 12 November 2026. The president used the session to order the government to produce a national concept for developing mass sports participation, to be approved by the summer of 2027.

Putin framed broad public participation, not elite medal counts, as the point. Elite sport mattered, he told the Council, but it was not the central goal.

“The main task remains people’s health and quality of life,” he said.

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Where Russia can and can’t compete

Degtyarev set out where Russians can currently line up. Twenty-two Olympic sports federations admit Russian adults under their own flag, and 31 admit juniors on the same basis. On the non-Olympic side, 48 federations admit adults and 51 admit juniors, according to the minister’s figures.

That still leaves a long list of federations barring Russian participation. Putin aimed his sharpest words of the day at the governments behind those exclusions.

“They are disregarding the judicial system in this area and, in fact, are disregarding all the principles of the Olympic International Charter,” he said of nations pushing to keep Russia out, according to TASS.

Russia will continue “to consistently and calmly pursue our interests” through legal channels, including the Court of Arbitration for Sport, Putin told the Council.

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“What nonsense”: the ranking rule Putin killed on the spot

The most striking exchange of the day was a domestic one. Dmitry Svishchev, head of the Russian Skiing and Snowboarding Federation, raised a bureaucratic rule that forces candidate masters of sport to reconfirm their ranking every three years, with lower ranks reconfirmed more often. Most countries, Svishchev noted, rely on current ratings instead.

Putin reacted on the spot.

“Is that rule currently in effect? What nonsense!” he said, reported URA News. “Excuse my bluntness, but what for?”

Vice-Premier Dmitry Chernyshenko was instructed to oversee the rule’s removal.

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The scale of the domestic calendar

The mass-sport push has a wide base to build on. More than 13,000 competitions are held at federal level every year, and around 230,000 nationwide, Putin told the Council. He wants regional and all-Russian federations to take charge of preparing those events, with the same approach written into the mass-sport concept now being drafted.

Putin’s instruction is that every citizen “must have the opportunity to choose an activity to their liking, to train regularly close to home, and to take part in competitions.” The summer 2027 deadline is now the government’s.

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