CSGO: BLAST bans Russian-based teams from its competitions
Sanctions continue to fall for Russia, following the invasion in Ukraine. Today, it is the organizers of BLAST who have decided not to invite any Russian teams to their tournaments in the near future.
BLAST, one of the biggest CS:GO tournament organizers, known for the BLAST Premier, announced today that they will not be inviting any Russian teams to their upcoming tournaments due to the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
This decision seems a bit bold and members of the community were quick to let BLAST know about it on social media. In particular, they accused the organization of creating a division within esports, an environment that is originally intended to be open to all and to bring together people from all regions of the world. „Gaming and esports unite people of all races, countries and creeds. We hope that the situation on the world stage will reflect this as soon as possible,“ said BLAST in its statement in response to these accusations.
— BLAST Premier (@BLASTPremier) March 1, 2022
BLAST has also decided to cancel the WePlay CIS Masters: Spring 2022, which was a qualifier for the Blast Premier: Spring Showdown 2022. According to them, this event is not appropriate to be held at this time. It was supposed to take place from March 25 to 27 and some Russian teams had already received their invitations like Entropiq, forZe, K23 and Virtus.pro.
But let's talk about the case of the Russian teams. One might think that this decision would affect all of them and therefore many teams like Gambit, Virtus.pro or even Team Spirit would not be able to participate. However, all the organizations currently partnering with BLAST are not at risk. As for Natus Vincere, even though most of the roster is made up of Russian players, the organization remains based in Ukraine and is also exempt from these sanctions.
As a reminder, several teams and players have supported Ukraine, while the CS:GO player s1mple has given a check to the army of his country. On the video game side, Wargaming donated $1 million to the Red Cross, and the VCT EMEA on Valorant was postponed.
