ATHENS: If the rules of ancient Greece were observed today, drone and missile fire over Ukraine would stop on Friday as guns fall silent in the Olympic tradition.
The Milan Cortina Winter Olympics begin in one week, and the United Nations and organizers are calling for a 7-week pause of all wars worldwide — as they do every time the Olympics take place.
It serves to set a moral baseline at a time when some researchers say there are more armed conflicts than ever before and Earth is at its closest to destruction.
An ancient pause, a modern plea
In ancient Greece, a truce was respected by warring city-states, allowing athletes and spectators to travel safely to Ancient Olympia for competitions and ceremonies of supreme athletic and spiritual significance.
The Olympics were revived in their modern form in 1896. The truce’s resurgence followed nearly a century later, in 1994, as war raged through the former Yugoslavia.
The proposed timeout starts one week before the Winter Games open on Feb. 6 and runs until one week after the March 15 Paralympics’ close. It is backed by a UN General Assembly resolution.
If history is any indication, no sudden worldwide peace is imminent: The truce has a dismal 0-17 record, having failed to halt a single war.
Sarajevo, Korea and the power of sport
The first modern Olympic truce, during the 1994 Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway, did produce a one-day pause in the siege of Sarajevo, allowing aid convoys to deliver food and medicine to the Bosnian capital’s desperate residents. In Sydney six years later, North and South Korea marched together at the opening ceremony.
Governments around the world overwhelmingly agree that sport can unite and heal.
“Wherever possible, we should strive toward creating even a small space for peace,” Constantinos Filis, director of the International Olympic Truce Center, told The Associated Press.
Ceasefire initiatives still count in an era of global disorder and political polarization, as unilateral aggression increasingly threatens international cooperation, argues Filis, who is also director of the Institute of Global Affairs in Athens.
“This may not always be achievable in practice,” he said, “but the message reaches every corner of the globe.”
Arithmetic of a world’s wars
Outside the Swedish capital of Stockholm, a group of academics has tracked global war trends for more than 80 years. It reported that 2024 had the highest number of active armed conflicts in a single year: 61.
“We’ve seen quite a strong increase in the number of conflicts over the past five or six years,” said Shawn Davies, a senior analyst at Uppsala University’s Department of Peace and Conflict Research. And its upcoming annual report will show 2025 had even more conflicts than the prior year, he added.
As the US steps back from multilateralism, Davies said, countries are becoming more likely to test their neighbors, creating a more volatile, fragmented security landscape.
Some major conflicts remain largely unnoticed in the West, he said, pointing to western Africa, where Al-Qaeda and Daesh group affiliates continue to spread across borders.
And the “Doomsday Clock”, a symbolic gauge of Earth’s existential peril, edged closer to midnight this week, according to an announcement from members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Hope versus broken promises
UN truce resolutions typically pass with broad majorities. Yet signatories repeatedly break their own pledge. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 infamously began during a truce period.
“I think the Olympics are an excellent moment to symbolize peace, to symbolize respect for international law, and to symbolize international cooperation,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres told reporters Thursday.
Kirsty Coventry, the multi-Olympic swimming champion who last year became the first woman to lead the International Olympic Committee, addressed the General Assembly at the latest vote in November.
Watching peaceful competition, she said, inspired her to begin her gold-medal journey as a young girl in Zimbabwe.
“Even in these dark times of division, it is possible to celebrate our shared humanity and inspire hope for a better future,” Coventry said.
“Sport — and the Olympic Games in particular — can offer a rare space where people meet not as adversaries, but as fellow human beings,” she said. “This is why the Olympic Truce is so important.”