Shakhtar’s CEO Sergei Palkin speaking to The Athletic criticized FIFA’s decision to allows foreign players to unilaterally suspend their contracts with Ukrainain clubs.

“Because of FIFA’s decision, FC Shakhtar has lost a chance to transfer four foreign players for the total amount of about €50 million.

Everyone believes we are one football family. This decision just crossed out this slogan. We are not one football family because nobody cares about Ukrainian clubs. This is a very big pity. FIFA does not care about us.

How was it possible to give me a week to close deals for our 14 foreign players? When you are dealing with clubs, players and agents, it is technically and physically not possible to do all that in a week. It is a very ridiculous decision but when FIFA issued the decision, within two days, we lost direct deals worth a minimum of €26m. They issued the decision and all the clubs said, ‘Thank you very much, FIFA helps us, we take these players for free’.

I read that FIFA had said that they had communicated with key stakeholders. It is not true. Completely not true. They did not communicate with our Ukrainian Association of Football. They did not communicate with major Ukrainian clubs. They made decisions without us completely. They did not consider that they need to contact those clubs and have some kind of opinion on their situation. In this war, everyone supports Ukraine and all the Ukrainian organisations. So how is it possible that FIFA, the body saying ‘We are one football family’, that they didn’t even pay attention to us?”.