Mikko Lehtonen and Leo Komarov are aiming for a KHL final place at the St. Petersburg SKA.
The five-and-a-half-week Russian invasion war in Ukraine has recently taken on increasingly brutal forms. Over the weekend, reports from Butsa, a small town near Kiev, that hundreds of Ukrainian civilians had been killed by Russian soldiers were shocked.
Russia’s reputation on sports fields is not waning these days. In the Russian-led KHL hockey league, three more Finnish players are still playing in the semi-finals of the series.
At the SKA in St. Petersburg, the defender who won the Olympic gold in Beijing is playing the puck Mikko Lehtonen and the attacker Leo Komarov. In addition, Traktor plays a striker in Chelyabinsk Teemu Pulkkinenwho, however, has been injured.
Lehtonen and Komarov will play in the semifinals at the SKA in St. Petersburg from the final place against the TsSKA in Moscow. SKA striker Joonas Kemppainen returned to Finland earlier.
– He returned due to injury, GM of the Finnish national team Jere Lehtinen specified.
The Russian offensive war in Ukraine has sparked a debate over whether players left in the KHL should even be excluded from the World Cup. Lehtinen will not leave in advance to close the World Cup gates from Lehtonen and Komarov, even though KHL is not in great demand abroad at this time of the world.
– We certainly all agree on the world situation … But it is difficult to take a stand on their relationship (Lehtonen and Komarov) without knowing what their situation is there. They are not the only hockey players to make a living at KHL. Anyone who has not been to Russia should think about which field to criticize, Lehtinen pointed out.
– Let’s see when the games in KHL are over, then you can take a stand, he added.
More than a dozen Olympic winners in the World Cup camp group
The Finnish national team will travel to Denmark for their first World Cup camp next Sunday. There are 14 Olympic winners in the Lions World Cup camp group. The Beijing gold team had a total of 17 KHL puckers.
– Next week on Wednesday and Thursday there will be national matches in Denmark. We have time to train well, which is important when there are a lot of players in the group who have not been involved in team activities for a while, Lehtinen said.
In recent years, Finland has won the World Championships in Slovakia in 2019 and the World Championship silver in Latvia in 2021.
The Finnish World Championships will start on May 13.