Qatar’s record of protecting the rights of migrant workers was under the microscope at the Fifa Congress in Doha on Thursday, but the war in Ukraine then took centre stage as a three-minute video message was aired from the head of the country’s soccer federation, Andriy Pavelko.

Pavelko wore an armoured vest as he spoke from Kyiv while behind him people packed sandbags several metres high to protect a monument. He said children in Ukraine were suffering from “terrible psychological injuries” during the war and that maybe football would help them in the future.

The Russian delegation watching in the room including Alexey Sorokin, a former Fifa Council member who led the organisation of the 2018 World Cup in his country. Although Fifa has banned Russian teams, including the men’s national team from World Cup qualifying, the football federation has not been suspended. “We are not hiding,” Sorokin said before the meeting. “We have every right to be here.”

Simmering tensions boiled to the surface when Norway’s soccer chief Lise Klaveness hit out at the Qatari hosts over the country’s human rights record. The Norwegian Football Federation president, who became the body’s first female leader in its 120-year history when elected this month, said the World Cup had been awarded by Fifa “in unacceptable ways with unacceptable consequences”.

Chief backtracks

Fifa president Gianni Infantino has stepped sharply back from hotly contested plans for a biennial World Cup, telling world soccer’s leadership that Fifa had never proposed such an idea.