MOSCOW, Jul 19 Timo Heinonen, Member of the Finnish Parliament and State Sports Council , commenting on the situation with goalkeeper Ivan Fedotov, said that Western countries and the National Hockey League (NHL) are ready to provide Russian athletes with political asylum. «It would be better for these athletes to join other countries. Western countries and the NHL could provide them with political asylum,» — Heinonen wrote on Twitter. Earlier, the military registration and enlistment office detained 25-year-old Fedotov in St. Petersburg. The goalkeeper, after the end of the season in the Continental Hockey League (KHL), where he played for CSKA Moscow, signed a contract with the Philadelphia Flyers of the National Hockey League (NHL). At the moment, the athlete is in a military unit in the Arkhangelsk region and, as his lawyer Alexei Ponomarev noted, “how he can keep fit.” On Monday, Russian tennis players Daria Kasatkina and Andrey Rublev, in an interview published on the YouTube channel of journalist Viktor Kravchenko, said that they can change sports citizenship if the Russians are suspended from all tournaments. In March, cyclist Pavel Sivakov changed his sports citizenship from Russian to French.
