Platini said FIFA needs a new president.

Russian President Vladimir Putin called the arrests of FIFA officials in Switzerland an attempt by the United States to prevent Joseph Blatter from reelection as president of the international football federation on the eve of the 2018 World Championship of the Year to be held in Russia.

“The FIFA presidential elections were to take place on Friday, and Mr. Blatter has every chance of being re-elected. And we know about the pressure that was put on him to ban the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia,” Putin said.

On Wednesday morning, in Switzerland, at the request of US law enforcement agencies, several FIFA officials were detained. The American investigation considers that they received large bribes. A total of 14 people are involved in the case, but not all of them are detained. The total amount of corruption in FIFA over the past 20 years alone, American investigators have estimated at 10 billion.

According to the Russian president, arrests of FIFA members, made at the request of the American side on corruption charges, looks “very strange, to say the least.”

“We can assume that one of them violated something, I don’t know, but for sure, the United States has nothing to do with this. They, these officials, are not US citizens,” Putin said.

Earlier, the Russian Foreign Ministry accused Washington of trying to “hold court far beyond its borders according to its own legal norms.”

“Without going into details of the accusations being brought forward, we draw attention to the fact that there is another case of illegal extraterritorial application of American legislation,” said Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich. “We hope that this will in no way be used to cast a shadow on the international football organization as a whole and the decisions it makes, including personnel decisions.”

“Caught the philosophy”

The Minister of Sport of Russia, Vitaly Mutko, is one of the ten current members of the FIFA Executive Committee who were summoned for interrogation to the Swiss Prosecutor General’s Office. On Wednesday, the local Department of Justice and Police opened a criminal case on violations in the election of the host countries of the world championships 2018 and 2022.

Following the searches at FIFA headquarters in Zurich, additional materials were seized.

At the same time, according to Mutko, Russia will not lose the right to host the 2018 World Cup.

“There is no risk of losing the World Championship. Blatter supported Russia, we received the World Cup with his support, because he had a goal to develop countries such as South Africa and Russia. We have captured this FIFA philosophy and based our application on this. The application had strong government support, which remains to this day,” Mutko said.

Meanwhile, the head of the Russian Football Union, Nikolai Tolstykh, said that the RFU intends to support Blatter’s candidacy in the election of the head of FIFA, since “he has done a lot for the development of football.”

FIFA said that the election, in which the current president of this organization, Sepp Blatter, will qualify for the fifth term, will be held on Friday, 29 May, as planned.