ANKARA 

The Turkish Airlines EuroLeague teams will hold a meeting Friday regarding events in Ukraine, EuroLeague tweeted Thursday. 

The 18 teams will meet to further analyze the course of events and take necessary actions, if needed, according to a statement.

Separately, FC Barcelona, a participating EuroLeague team, announced on their website that they will not travel to Saint Petersburg in Russia for the game against Zenit St Petersburg that is scheduled to be played Friday.

Barca said they have two upcoming games on Russian soil; the other is on Sunday against CSKA Moscow.

The team added that various meetings are scheduled for Thursday with involved parties and a decision will be made in the next few hours.

- The Donbas crisis and Russia's military intervention

Ukraine’s February 2014 “Maidan revolution” led to President Viktor Yanukovych fleeing the country and a pro-Western government coming to power.

Russia then illegally annexed Crimea, and separatists declared “independence” in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Donbas in eastern Ukraine, both of which have large ethnic Russian populations.

Clashes took place between Russian-backed separatist forces and the Ukrainian army. The 2014 and 2015 Minsk agreements, signed in Moscow with the intervention of Western powers, tried to stop the conflict but cease-fire violations continued and as of February, 14,000 people had lost their lives in the conflict.

Late last year, Russia made headlines with the deployments of tens of thousands of its troops on the border with Ukraine.

The US said Russia was preparing for an invasion but Moscow denied it.

Despite the threat of Western sanctions, Moscow recognized the separatist governments in Donbas earlier this week and launched a military operation into Ukrainian territory on Feb. 24.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said the operation aims to protect people “subjected to genocide” by Kyiv and to “demilitarize and denazify” Ukraine.

He called on the Ukrainian army to lay down its arms.