Ice hockey | Ivan Fedotov, who was born in Finland, has companions of fate – in Russia, ice hockey players have been recruited into the army before and also bought out of it

In Lappeenranta Russian born ice hockey player Ivan Fedotov played last season in the ice hockey league KHL for TsSKA Moscow and for the Russian Olympic Committee team at the Winter Olympics.

For the next season, he was supposed to join the NHL team Philadelphia Flyers, but on Friday he was arrested In St. Petersburg, suspected of evading invitations.

CSKA is the central sports club of the Russian army. Participating in invitations became relevant for Fedotov when he no longer has a Russian employer as his savior, and Russia classifies the United States as an unfriendly state.

St. Petersburg newspaper Fontanka according to Fedotov is in Severodvinsk on the southern shore of the Gulf of Viennese in northern Russia at the naval training center. Fedotov is in town in training until Septemberafter which it will be decided where he will complete his military service

Soviet Union during that time, athletes were a close part of the defense forces and belonged to certain departments, he says Sportrbc’s article. With the commercialization of sports, this practice was gradually abandoned and hockey players only served on paper.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ties of the leading clubs with the military departments were gradually severed. Despite this, athletes from top clubs often avoid the military in Russia.

But not always. For example, the NHL contract has accelerated recruitment in Russia before.

Sportrbc reports that in 2001 the players of the hockey club Avantgard Omsk Stanislav Chistov, Kirill Koltsov and Alexander Svitov was unexpectedly assigned to Avangard-VDV – a farm team whose athletes lived in the garrison.

Later it turned out that the club’s manager tried to prevent the hockey players from leaving for North America.

“The then leader of Avangard Anatoly Bardin found out we were going to America and sent me and Sasha Svitov to the right military unit.”

“We lived there for a couple of weeks like real soldiers with early awakenings and discipline,” Chistov said, according to Sportrbc, in a news report from the Championship website.

The Ministry of Defense tried to take advantage of the situation and its own players to TsSKA, but it was in conflict with the rules of the Russian Ice Hockey Federation and the commercial league. The incident was publicized, and the players did not have to return to Omsk. In the summer of 2002, they left for North America.

Always however, you don’t need an NHL reservation in order to become eligible to join the service. In October 2017, the best scorer of the season for Dynamo Moscow Vladimir Bryukvin missed one regular season game with Spartak because he had to enlist in the army.

On the day of the match, he was in a military unit and the club’s management failed to negotiate with him on the field. A Russian told about it Sport-Express -magazine.

Avoiding the service sometimes requires means of negotiation. Sportrbc reports that in 2019 it was revealed that the Metallurg Magnitogorsk administration had bribed the military commissar to exempt the club’s players from military service.

Thanks to the bribes Alexander Igoshev, Alexey Bereglazov, Grigory Dronov and Pavel Varfomolomeyev received fake medical certificates proving that they were unfit for military service.