The IIHF Russia Ruling: CAS Settled the Evidence and Left the Flag, the Draw and the Border
The panel ruled only that the IIHF's evidence failed its own regulation's test. The flag, the format and the funding decision belong to other bodies, and none of them has decided.
By Dec. 26, when the world juniors open in Edmonton and Red Deer, the tournament is supposed to hold ten teams in two groups of five, playing 29 games. The Court of Arbitration for Sport has ordered an 11th team into it. Fifty-six days stand between the ruling and the first puck drop, and the three questions it leaves open now belong to three different bodies.
The IIHF Russia ruling is narrow, and the federation’s case failed the panel’s test. Only substantiated security concerns could outweigh the participation of athletes of a particular nationality, the three arbitrators ruled unanimously, and the evidence the IIHF brought did not meet that standard. The panel, Giulio Palermo of Italy, Ismail Selim of Egypt and Mark Hovell of the United Kingdom, set the IIHF Council’s exclusion decision aside with immediate effect. It ordered no alternative, no neutral-team regime and no new format, because those questions were not asked and were not decided. What the panel released was the operative part only, case CAS/A/12753, with its reasoning still to come.
The IIHF’s own Disciplinary Board had reached the same conclusion five months earlier. It annulled the Council’s January decision not to reintegrate Russian teams for the 2026-27 season, finding the evidence insufficient to establish the legal requirements for keeping them out, and sent the matter back for re-analysis on safety, security, operational and sporting plans. The Council looked again in June and kept the ban. The two sides then agreed to skip the remaining internal steps and put the question directly to CAS, which heard the case in Lausanne on Oct. 23 and 26.
Seventeen days before the hockey award, the same court went the other way in curling. CAS dismissed appeals by the Russian Curling Federation and Russian athletes on Oct. 13 and left adult Russian curlers excluded, accepting World Curling’s case that bringing them back would damage the working of its competitions, with teams refusing to play Russians, hosts refusing to stage events and visa refusals among the problems cited. The difference between the two outcomes is the test each federation’s rules set. World Curling argued functioning and integrity. The IIHF argued security, under a regulation that demanded the concerns be substantiated, and brought evidence the panel found insufficient. The same CAS release records the wider pattern. The court partly upheld Russian appeals in luge and skiing in late 2025, allowing athletes to compete under neutral-athlete eligibility rules. Ukraine’s appeal against the International Olympic Committee’s July decision to provisionally lift the Russian Olympic Committee’s suspension is still open.
Under what flag the Russian team would play is still undecided. Ukraine’s federation answered the ruling on its website with a statement the Reuters news agency reproduced in full: “We wish to express deep outrage at this decision, taken amid a full-scale war. The threats that were the reason for suspending Russian teams in 2022 have not disappeared. On the contrary, they have only intensified.” A spokesperson for Czech President Petr Pavel said the president considers it appropriate to ban athletes competing under the Russian and Belarusian flags while Russian aggression continues. That position matters in Czechia, which hosts the under-18 women’s championship in January. Finland’s chair, Heikki Hietanen, wrote that “no player or team official is under any obligation to take part in a tournament in which Russia or Belarus is involved,” and said the federation would support anyone who chose not to play.
The junior draw leaves no obvious place for an extra team. The groups were set from last season’s finish, with Norway promoted in place of Denmark, who were relegated: Sweden, Finland, the United States, Slovakia and Germany in Red Deer; Canada, Czechia, Switzerland, Latvia and Norway in Edmonton. Russia has no finish from last season to seed from, and the senior ranking the IIHF uses for seedings at the men’s championship excludes Russia because of its suspension. An 11th team turns one group of five into a group of six, which plays 15 round-robin games instead of 10, five more games in a group stage that runs from Dec. 26 to Dec. 31, with the teams in the larger group playing five games in six days. As of Saturday, the IIHF hadn’t announced a group, a schedule change or a relegation mechanic for an 11-team field.
Germany’s draw is further along and harder to disturb. Sixteen teams were drawn into two groups of eight in June for the championship in Düsseldorf and Mannheim, May 14 to May 30. A 17th team would add eight group games to one group, inside the same dates. Ukraine sits in Group A in Mannheim, a newly promoted team back in the top division for the first time since 2007 after winning promotion on the last day of the Division IA tournament in Sosnowiec. The Associated Press noted that removing a qualified team to make room for Russia would risk a backlash, above all if the team removed were Ukraine. Germany’s federation, which hosts the tournament, said its position had not changed, and its chair, Frank H. Lutz, said “allowing Russia in has significant security, political and financial consequences for us as hosts.” Sweden’s federation said a boycott was not on the table.
Anita Anand, Canada’s foreign affairs minister, said the country strongly opposed the outcome and would keep its own restrictions on Russian athletes at events in Canada that receive federal funding, while exploring further options to hold the Russian government to account. Her sport counterpart, Adam van Koeverden, said Canada’s position since 2022 had been that Russia should not be represented in international sport while its invasion of Ukraine continued. The funding line is the lever Ottawa has named, and it is untested for this tournament: Hockey Canada says the federal government hasn’t yet committed money to the 2027 juniors, while Alberta put $11 million toward hosting hockey events, including the juniors, in 2024.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said the province would not try to block Russia’s participation and would comply with the ruling. Lydia Migus, president of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress’s Alberta chapter, said, “It’s basically a slap in the face for humanity,” and said Alberta was home to more than 400,000 Ukrainians or people of Ukrainian descent, with 65,000 to 70,000 having arrived since the war began.
Russia’s federation welcomed the decision and said it would work with the IIHF to put the return into effect, identifying the Alberta juniors as its next major tournament. Sports Minister Mikhail Degtyaryov wrote on Telegram that the court had recognized the Russian federation’s demands on key points as justified. Two other Russian appeals from 2026 remain in the CAS record: one over the federation’s in-person participation at the IIHF Congress in May was withdrawn in June, and an earlier appeal against the Disciplinary Board’s May decision is still listed as ongoing. Belarus, excluded on the same grounds, was not mentioned in it.
