Vice Prime Minister Vitali Mutko Leaves Russia 2018 World Cup Organizing Committee

Vice Prime Minister of Russia, Vitali Mutko, announced that he is leaving the organizing committee of the 2018 World Cup in Russia, after temporarily resigning as president of the Russian Football Union (RFU).

"Alexei Sorokin will be the president of the 'Russia 2018' organizing committee. I will focus on my work in the Government," Mutko said in a statement.

He assured that Sorokin, the face of the organizing committee worldwide, will also be in charge of representing Russia to FIFA.

"There is still a lot of work to be done, but I am absolutely convinced that everything will be ready within the planned deadlines and on May 30 we will submit all the documents to FIFA," he said.

In this regard, the organizing committee issued a statement informing that Mutko's decision will not in any way influence the progress of the World Cup preparations.

It added that Mutko will continue to coordinate both the preparations of the regions involved in the World Cup and the implementation of the necessary infrastructure from his position in the Government.

Mutko also announced that he is leaving his position as head of the RFU for a period of six months to appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) the decision of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to ban him for life from the Games due to allegations of state-sponsored doping.

Indeed, Mutko submitted the appeal to CAS, a decision that has not been supported by the president of the Russian Olympic Committee, Alexander Zhukov.

In addition to forcing Russian athletes to compete individually at the PyeongChang Winter Games, on December 5 the IOC indefinitely suspended Mutko from the Olympic Games.

Mutko is considered by the Western press the main responsible for the cover-up scheme of positive tests at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Russian President Vladimir Putin had already removed him from the position of Minister of Sports in October 2016 following the doping scandal in Russian sports that left the entire athletics team out of the Rio Games and excluded the entire Paralympic team as well.

A collaborator of Putin for a quarter of a century and former president of Zenit St. Petersburg, Mutko was mentioned in the diary of the main whistleblower of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), Grigory Rodchenkov, former director of the Moscow Anti-Doping Laboratory.