Zelenskyy invited Bach to Bakhmut to "see with his own eyes that neutrality does not exist" after the IOC confirmed that it was looking to explore a pathway to reintegrate athletes from Russia and Belarus under a neutral banner for next year's Olympic Games in Paris.

Zelenskyy's invation came shortly after figure skater Dymtro Sharpar, who had represented Ukraine in the 2016 Youth Winter Olympic Games, and Volodymyr Androshchuk, a 22-year-old who was part of his country's athletics team, representing them in the decathlon, were both killed during fighting in Bakhmut.

Volodymyr Androshchuk, a 22-year-old track and field athlete who was a member of the Ukrainian national team, also died in battle last week.

Zelenskyy’s invitation to Bach came in a video address where he stressed that "any neutral flag of Russian athletes is stained with blood".

But Bach, who had visited Ukraine in July 2022 where he met Zelenskyy and discussed the restoration of sporting infrastructure in the war-torn country, turned down the invitation with a curt message from his media team, who said, "Currently there are no plans for another visit to Ukraine."

The arguments over the potential participation of athletes from Russia and Belarus at Paris 2024 serve only to underline how the sporting world has struggled for more than a century to come to terms with the concept of "political neutrality".

In doing so, it has often adopted contradictory positions, seen official awards bestowed on dictators and even Olympics staged when the host nation was engaged in military activities in another sovereign nation.

When the first shots of the First World War were fired in 1914, the IOC had only just celebrated its 20th anniversary.

Plans were already well advanced for Berlin to host the 1916 Olympics when War came.

This did not immediately signal the cancellation of the Olympics, but they were eventually designated as "not celebrated".

IOC member Sir Theodore Cook, one of Britain's three representatives at the time and a key figure in the organisation of the 1908 Olympics in London, resigned his position.

"It seemed to me that sport with Germany as a comrade had become impossible, and that the Games without her could neither be called Olympic or described as open to the world," he said.

When the Olympics resumed in 1920, they were awarded to Antwerp in Belgium, a nation which had borne the brunt of the terrible trench warfare and which had claimed so many lives during the conflict,

It was perhaps no surprise that Germany, Austria-Hungary and other defeated powers were not allowed to take part, an exclusion still in force when the 1923 IOC Session was held in Rome 100 years ago.

By then, Benito Mussolini had seized power in Italy, and sport in the country would soon be controlled by his Fascist regime.

Mussolini had styled himself "Il Duce" - the leader.

Very soon, international sporting organisations had agreed to take their events in Italy.

These included the 1927 European Swimming Championships in Bologna.

The International Students Confederation, a forerunner of the International University Sport Federation (FISU), also held its Student World Championships in Rome in 1927.

In 1933,  altogether more ambitious World Student Games were held in the newly built Stadio Mussolini in Turin.

Students from the Gruppi Universitari Fascisti  were prominent in its organisation and Mussolini’s henchman Achille Starace opened them with a screeching salutation to "Il Duce".

The inaugural men’s European Athletics Championships in 1934 were also held in the same stadium.

Italy was also chosen to host the 1934 FIFA World Cup.

Mussolini was a vocal and highly visible supporter of the home team and was present in the Stadio Nazionale PNF - which English translated to National Stadium of the National Fascist Party - when they defeated Czechoslovakia 2-1 in Rome to lift the trophy.

Shortly afterwards, the Italians travelled to England, who had been absent from the tournament.

In a brutal affair which came to be known as the "Battle of Highbury," England won 3-2.

Even so, Italian coach Vittorio Pozzo praised his team's performance "due to the spiritual atmosphere in which we live in Italy today," a clear reference to Mussolini.

By this time, the IOC had already awarded the 1936 Olympics to Berlin, the decision made before Adolf Hitler came to power.

Preparations achieved a level of sophistication not seen before, but the true nature of the Nazi regime soon also became clear, prompting boycott calls from groups in the United States and Britain.

Assurances that Jewish athletes would be given the same chance to participate were given and seemed to be taken at face value by IOC members.

The Games opened on time in 1936 but as teams paraded in front of Hitler’s tribune of honour some had given the "Olympic Salute" which bore a remarkable resemblance to that used by the Nazis.

The British team chose to give a curt "eyes right," which apparently caused some astonishment.

Two years later, the England football team travelled to Berlin to play a reciprocal fixture.

The two nations had met in 1935 at White Hart Lane, home of Tottenham Hotspur, a team with a large Jewish following.

There had been demonstrations against the presence of the German team to the extent that Football Association (FA) President Sir Charles Clegg felt the need to apologise.

"We as English sportsmen desire to express our regret at the annoyance to which our visitors have been subjected," Clegg told the Germans.

Hitler did not attend the 1938 match in Berlin, but his deputy Rudolf Hess and Joachim Von Ribbentrop, previously Aambassador to Britain and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels were amongst the 110,000 crowd.

"It is almost certain that we shall decide to salute in the Nazi manner," Charles Wreford-Brown, an FA official and leader of the England party, said.

"It is an important matter and we do not want any misunderstandings."

Two years later, the England football team travelled to Berlin to play a reciprocal fixture.

The England team gave the "German greeting" during the playing of the German national anthem and as the band played the Nazi song, Horst Wessel Lied.

"The action of the English players in raising their right arms in greeting during the playing of the national anthem and in taking leave of spectators at the end of the game was particularly well appreciated,"  Nazi state newspaper Völkischer Beobachter noted approvingly. 

Even reports in British newspapers described  "a picturesque sight,with the Nazi flags all around the ground and two British flags."

"You can say we greatly appreciated the attitude of everyone, the players greatly admired the sportsmanship of the crowd," FA Secretary Stanley Rous told reporters.

Some criticised the gesture.

"For Englishmen to give the Nazi salute is ridiculous and for the Football Association to instruct them to do so and then be annoyed if they don’t is equally so, “ wrote 'Crusader' in his column for the Leicester Evening Mail .

It was only much later that whole episode was seen as shameful and a symbol of appeasement. 

By then, the Japanese war in China had now prompted them to hand back the 1940 Olympics in Tokyo and also the Winter Games in Sapporo.

There was no talk of banning Japan from participating in the Olympics.

Helsinki replaced them as hosts for the 1940 Summer Olympics and, as the fateful year of 1939 continued, a dispute over skiing saw St. Moritz withdraw from hosting that year's Winter Olympics. 

Garmisch Partenkirchen in Germany host of the 1936 Winter Games was chosen to act as hosts once again.

Even after World War Two broke out, there remained hope that Germany would still host the Winter Games and participate in Helsinki.

"The International Olympic Committee having organised the Olympic Games under other stormy days will not abandon those in 1940," a communique from Lausanne said.

"The 1940 Games will be celebrated at all costs, if necessary on a smaller scale,the Northern Olympia will weather the storm." 

Yet by late 1939, Finland was also at war after an invasion by the Soviet Union.

IOC members around the world wrote to pledge support for Finland.

Eventually, Werner Klingeberg, a German official seconded as special advisor to the Helsinki, wrote sadly to IOC President Baillet Latour about "a fatal year to the work of the IOC."

He concluded his letter, "I believe nothing remains in this moment but to do its duty and the almighty may save the work of [Baron Pierre de] Coubertin also to a better future,"

After the War ended, IOC President Sigfrid Edstrom took London 1948 organisers to task for refusing to countenance the re-admission of Germany and Japan at the Games.

Both nations eventually returned to the Olympic fold at Helsinki in 1952.

In the 1950s, new IOC President Avery Brundage outlined his own thoughts on political neutrality.

"In an imperfect world, if participation in sport is to be stopped every time politicians violate the laws of humanity, there will never be any international contests. Is it not better to try and expand the sportsmanship of the athletic field into other areas?" he said.

It is a philosophy which one way or another has informed the leadership of each one of Brundage’s successors, yet it faced an immediate  test in 1956.

There was no talk of suspending the Soviet Union, despite its military intervention in Hungary when tanks rolled into Budapest to put down an uprising when thousands of protesters took to the streets demanding a more democratic political system and freedom from Moscow oppression. More than 2,000 Hungarians were killed and another 200,000 fled the country to seek political refuge abroad.

Nor were there any sanctions against Britain and France when, together with Israel, they invaded Egypt to recover control of the Suez Canal following its nationalisation.

The question of human rights became a more prominent consideration in the 1960s, a decade of increasing political awareness around the world.

Yet, under Brundage, the IOC were slow off the mark in responding to the problems of the South African apartheid system.

"If we are to judge apartheid per se, it is not for us to send a commission at all," Brundage told Lord Killanin, President of the Olympic Council of the Ireland at the time, before an IOC Commission went to South Africa in 1967.

"Our concern is with the NOC (National Olympic Committee) and what it is doing to comply with the Olympic regulations."

South Africa had last competed in the Olympics Games at Rome 1960, held only a few months after the massacre at Sharpeville, when South African police had fired on a crowd of demonstrators, killing 69 people and injuring another 180, including 29 children, yet official suspension did not come until a decade later.

In 1968, a few days before the Olympics in Mexico City, Government authorities sent special security forces into the Plaza de Tres Culturas to suppress a student demonstration. 

A total of 300 were said to have died when the security forces opened fire in what was clearly a planned assault.

The IOC leadership, led by Brundage, offered no reproach.

In 1973, the Chileans proposed to stage the second leg FIFA World Cup qualifier against the Soviet Union in Santiago's National Stadium.

This had been used as an internment camp for political prisoners after General Augusto Pinochet’s coup to depose President Salvador Allende.

Soviet officials called for the match to be played another venue.

"If our observers find that security measures for the match are not assured in Chile, the match will be played elsewhere," FIFA President Sir Stanley Rous - the secretary general of the FA when England had played in Berlin 35 years earlier - assured them.

FIFA general secretary  Helmut Käser flew to Chile as one of the inspectors. 

"The situation is quite normal," he reported.

"If one should take into account each time the domestic conditions of a country, not organise a match where there are political detainees or where one mourns victims of a system, then tell me in which country one would safely organise a football match?" 

The Soviets refused to travel to Santiago and Chile were awarded the match by default to qualify for the 1974 FIFA World Cup.

Argentina had been awarded the 1978 tournament when the country was still under military rule.

A succession of different Governments followed in the intervening years. 

Then, in 1976, another military junta took over, two years before the competition was scheduled to take place.

By now, FIFA was led by Brazilian João Havelange, a former Olympic swimmer and water polo player who had famously declared: "I don't do politics," 

Despite protests from human rights groups, FIFA insisted that there would be no change of venue.

Havelange insisted that the world was about to see the "true face of Argentina."

The tournament was opened by General Jorge Rafael Videla, head of a military Government which had interned and tortured thousands on suspicion of subversion, many in a centre within earshot of the Estadio Monumental in Buenos Aires.

"The confrontation on the playing field and the friendship in the field of human relations allow us to assert that it is possible even today to co-exist in unity and diversity, which is the only way to build peace," Videla declared at the Opening Ceremony.

"I wish that this event will really be a contribution to affirming peace, a peace we all wish for for all the world and for all the people in the world and be a mark of peace between peoples."

By the end of the month, Argentina were world champions.

Over the next few years, Admiral Carlos Lacoste, the junta member responsible for organising the tournament, became a leading member of FIFA.

Then again, sport has often been uneasy about some of the personalities it has had to accommodate.

In the pre-War years, IOC members included Italian fascist Georgio Vaccaro and German Karl Ritter Von Halt, who the IOC website describes as showing "an obvious enthusiasm for Nazi politics."

The roll of honour for the Olympic Order many years later also reveals Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, East German President Erich Honecker and Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe.

It had also been awarded to Russian President Vladimir Putin by Bach before he was stripped of it after the invasion of Ukraine. 

Spanish dictator General Franco had hosted an IOC Session in 1965.

More recently former International Ice Hockey Federation President René Fasel was criticised for his fraternisation with Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, a man subject to IOC sanctions.

The threats of a boycott of Paris 2024 if Russian and Belarusian athletes are allowed to take part represents the first significant threat of this kind to the since the 1980s. 

Three successive Olympics were heavily boycotted in the course of a decade.

It is calculated that around 65 countries decided to stay away from the 1980 Olympics in Moscow in response to the Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan.

The United States, West Germany, Japan and Canada were amongst prominent absentees.

Moscow had been elected as hosts in 1974, a choice which provoked immediate protests from human rights groups.

Then in December 1979, little more than seven months before they were to open, Soviet military forces went into Afghanistan.

US President Jimmy Carter immediately demanded the Olympics be "moved to an alternate site, or postponed, or cancelled."

The IOC stance was to reaffirm their neutrality.

They changed their regulations to make it easier for National Olympic Committees to compete.

"I would like to welcome all the athletes and officials here to day especially those who have shown their complete independence to travel to compete despite many pressures placed on them," Lord Killanin, by now IOC President having succeeded Brundage, said at the Opening Ceremony.

"These Games belong to the International Olympic Committee and are allocated purely on the ability of the host city to organise them, I ask you all to compete in the true spirit of mutual understanding above all differences of politics religion or race,"

The misgivings expressed by many over 40 years ago have found echoes in recent times, notably at the beginning and end of 2022.

Poland now claims that some 40 nations would support a boycott of Paris 2024, if competitors from Belarus and Russia are allowed to compete. 

Meanwhile, former IOC Athletes' Commission leader Kirsty Coventry has insisted that a majority of athletes support their re-admission.

What seems certain is that these are the first skirmishes in a dispute which threatens to be as serious as any faced by the Olympic Movement in over a century.