https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/17/russia-will-be-asked-for-ceasefire-during-olympics-macron-tells-ukraine-interviewer.html
The International Olympic Committee condemned Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, saying the Russian government had breached the Olympic Truce.
I mean it's not about personal hate. If the Olympic Games are about peaceful competition, you could exclude countries that don't adhere to that based on certain rules.
And yes, it is whataboutism. He was questioning Russia being part of it, he wasn't approving any of the other countries you listed. You can denounce Russia AND other countries. It's possible.
Coulda fooled me. If you wanted to, you could prune an awful lot of countries from the "peace pls" competition, but for some reason even the notion is only ever brought up in one or two particular cases.
And it's not whataboutism, whataboutism is a red herring, I'm making a pretty direct point. If it were, bringing up any comparison or precedent would be whataboutism.
Your argument can be roughly translated to "so whst about those other countries then? Shouldn't they need to be excluded as well?". The point is, no one is disagreeing with you, but you are distracting from the fact that Russia is one of those countries. I'm also unsure if you are intentionally doing it, but you are doing it.
You can do this in a different way: instead of "but what about those countries?" You can say "and if we look into Russia, we definitely need to also look into some of the other countries". This makes it less confrontational and you are agreeing with the premise that there is an issue which should be acted upon.
I can only assume you agree with the base point because Russia doing shady things in regards to the Olympic Games is pretty well documented, and penalizing them is a logical conclusion.
Maybe we could start with countries credibly accused of being currently in the act of committing genocides and work our way down?