Yakutsk, the capital of the Far Eastern republic of Sakha (Yakutia), is hosting the Children of Asia games this month, an international sporting event for children and youth from the Asian continent. To those who have never heard of the games before, Children of Asia might seem like yet another sportswashing project engineered by the Kremlin to break through the wall of wartime geopolitical isolation — similar to the BRICS games held in Tatarstan’s capital Kazan last month, which attracted so few participants that some Russian athletes were literally competing against themselves. In fact, Chil…
