World Aquatics' easing of restrictions on athletes (stretching to team events) from the aggressor nations Russia and Belarus in the illegal war on sovereign Ukraine is on a collision course with the direction of travel in the European Union.

The 2025 European Short-Course Championships will take place in Lublin, Poland, from December 2-7 but the easing of WA guidelines are of no help to European Aquatics: Lublin is just an hour's drive from the borders of both Ukraine and Belarus - and Poland has a strict rule in place: no Russians, no visas for Russians.

Given that the illegal war is still the same illegal war, in full flow, Ukrainian lives being lost and infrastructure pounded to pulp on a regular basis, the new WA guidelines - which ease restrictions imposed precisely because of conditions that still exist - can only be seen as illogical, and might even be read as an act of appeasement by the global regulator to its new HQ host nation, Hungary, an outlier in Europe that has failed to call Putin out for his illegal invasion 70 years after the Hungarian Revolution.

During the 1950s, the Hungarians, and more specifically intellectuals and students embittered by the Communist regime, demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops and the organisation of free, pluralist elections. How times change.