A group of 35 countries, including the United States, Germany and Australia, will demand that Russian and Belarusian athletes be banned from the 2024 Olympics, Lithuania’s sports minister said on Friday, adding to uncertainty over the Paris Games, Reuters reported.

The move increases pressure on the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which is desperate to avoid the sports event being disrupted by the bloody conflict in Ukraine.

“We are moving in the direction where we don’t need a boycott, because all countries are unanimous,” said Jurgita Syugzdiniene.

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy took part in an online meeting of 35 ministers to discuss the request for a ban, noting that 228 Ukrainian athletes and coaches died as a result of Russian aggression.

“If there was an Olympic sport with assassinations and missile attacks, you would know which team would come first,” he told ministers.

“Terror and Olympism are two opposite things, they cannot be combined,” he added.

British Sports Minister Lucy Fraser said on Twitter that the meeting was very productive.

“We have made the UK’s position clear: while Putin continues his barbaric war, Russia and Belarus should not be represented at the Olympics,” she wrote.

As Ukraine is at war, the Baltic states, the Scandinavian countries and Poland have asked international sports organizations to ban Russian and Belarusian athletes from the Olympics.

Russia launched a wave of attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure in the cities of Kharkiv and Zaporizhia on Friday morning, as Ukrainian officials said a long-awaited Russian offensive was underway in the country’s east.

“We know that 70% of Russian athletes are military. I consider it unacceptable that such people take part in the Olympic Games in the current situation, when fair play clearly means nothing to them,” said the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic Jan Lipavsky after a meeting with the heads of the Czech IOC and the national sports agency.

The boycott is gaining momentum

Ukraine has threatened to boycott the Games if Russian and Belarusian athletes participate, and Ukrainian boxer Oleksandr Usyk has said the Russians will win “medals of blood, death and tears” if they are allowed to participate.

Such threats revived memories of the Cold War boycotts of the 1970s and 1980s, which still haunt the world Olympic organization, which urged Ukraine to abandon them.

However, Polish Minister of Sports Kamil Bortnychuk said that a boycott is not yet under consideration.

“It is not yet time to talk about a boycott,” he told a news conference, noting that there were other ways to pressure the IOC that could be explored first.

He stated that the majority of the participants were in favor of the absolute exclusion of Russian and Belarusian athletes.

“The majority of votes – except for Greece, France, Japan – were exactly in this tone,” he said.

According to him, a compromise solution can be the creation of a group of refugees, which will include Russian and Belarusian dissidents.

Bach criticizes Ukraine and fears that the boycott will affect revenues

The IOC opened the door for Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete under the Olympic flag as neutrals. He said the boycott would violate the Olympic Charter and that the inclusion of Russians and Belarusians was based on a UN resolution against discrimination in the Olympic movement.

With around 18 months to go before the Games begin, the IOC is desperately trying to calm the waters so as not to jeopardize the Games’ message of global peace and deal a huge blow to revenue.

While Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of the host city of Paris, said Russian athletes should not compete, organizers of the 2024 Paris Olympics, which said last week they would respect the IOC’s decision on who would compete in the Games, declined to comment.

Russia’s sports ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The representative of the IOC stated that he would not comment on “interpretations of individual participants of the meeting, the general content of which is unknown.”

In a letter to the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine sent on January 31, International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach criticized Ukraine’s threat to boycott the Games, saying it would violate the Olympic Charter, Kyiv Independent reports.

“The threat of a boycott of the Olympic Games (…) goes against the foundations of the Olympic movement and the principles we stand for,” said Bach’s letter, which German journalist Hayo Zeppelt posted on Twitter on February 9. “In this regard, the NOC of Ukraine certainly does not enjoy the support or solidarity of the vast majority of shareholders of the Olympic movement.”

Bach added in his letter to Ukrainian Sports Minister Vadym Gutzeit that Ukraine’s attempt to force other countries to boycott the Games was “extremely regrettable” and that “previous boycotts did not achieve their political goals.”