Imagine being a Ukrainian watching either game – as many will have been to see the Premier League clubs show their support for their heroic resistance – and hearing Chelsea supporters behave like that.
It will have sounded like an English football club celebrating Russia at a time when the rest of the world is condemning their behaviour. It would have felt like a betrayal.
Chelsea supporters may argue they are merely thanking the man who bankrolled the most successful period in the club’s history, the man who bought them two Champions League titles and showered them with some of the world’s best players and managers as part of his vanity project.
They probably feel they are displaying tremendous loyalty to the club, and defiance to the predicament they are in, but they must understand the wider implications of their actions.
It not only disrespected the victims of the war in Ukraine, it deliberately and provocatively praised a man who is so intrinsically linked to the Kremlin and the man responsible for the worst humanitarian crisis in Europe since the Second World War, that he has been sanctioned by the UK government.
Neither Britain, the European Union, the USA, Canada or any of other western allies have taken these sorts of measures before. It is a coordinated action to hurt the billionaire oligarchs, like Abramovich, who prop up, fund and support Putin.
They have done it for a valid and good reason. It is done to try and stop this war, to show united, international opposition to what Russia is doing. It is about hurting those who have facilitated Putin’s rise to power and kept him there to do the terrible things he has ordered now.
How many of these same Chelsea fans wear a poppy every year and celebrate Britain’s own heroic resistance to an evil and hostile foreign power looking to take away our independence and liberty?
Abramovich’s ownership of Chelsea was an exercise in Russian soft power and the events that have unfolded since the war in Ukraine began mean he had to be punished and ostracised. Chelsea fans would rather ignore all that.
