Helsinki’s “Jokerit” team did not go to the Continental Hockey League (KHL) game scheduled for a technical loss in Minsk on Thursday.
The match had to start on Thursday at 18.10, but the tournament organizers announced that the game will not take place on September 3.
The departure of the team represented by Jānis Kalniņš to Minsk in Finland was sharply criticized, because the President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko used hockey and the “Dynamo” of Minsk as a propaganda tool.
The team previously announced that it will spend only eight hours in Minsk and then go to Latvia, where it will have a match with the Riga “Dinamo” unit on Saturday. True, the Helsinki unit did not arrive at the airport at all.
“Jokerit” has not yet commented on its decision not to go to Minsk, but the sports portal “Jatkoaika.com”, referring to the information at its disposal, reports that hockey players have been threatened with death, so they did not want to go to the Belarusian capital.
Protests against the rigging of the August 9 presidential election, which has often escalated into protesters’ clashes with security forces, continue in Belarus. Thousands have been detained and several hundred injured in protests. Workers in many state-owned enterprises are on strike.
According to official results, the current authoritarian President Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994, won 80.1% of the vote, while opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovska won 10.1%, but the opposition believes the election results are fake and the election victory has convincingly won. . The European Union also does not recognize the election results.
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