The Russian government helped its athletes cheat at the Olympics and other international sporting events. This is not an overstatement or speculation. The findings of an independent investigation led by a Canadian lawyer at the behest of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) leave no room for reasonable doubt about the fraud perpetrated at the highest levels of Vladimir Putin's cabinet.
Richard McLaren, the investigator, looked into the allegations of a Russian whistleblower who said that he was involved in a government-run scheme to cheat at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, in 2014. Using forensic testing and examining the files deleted from computer hard drives, Mr. McLaren has laid out an airtight case that the allegations are true.
The facts are staggering. The Russian deputy minister of sport, appointed by Mr. Putin in 2010, ran the operation. Every country tests its own athletes; every time a Russian athlete tested positive for a banned substance, the Moscow laboratory that did the testing would immediately inform the deputy minister. He would tell the lab which tests to ignore and which to falsify as clean.
Things were more complicated at the Sochi Olympics, where independent observers would be present, so the Sports Ministry developed a system of swapping out dirty urine samples with clean ones provided by select athletes before the Games. Mr. McLaren found incontrovertible evidence that Russian urine samples had been tampered with at Sochi.
And all of this because the Russians didn't win enough medals at the Vancouver Winter Olympics four years earlier. The Russians took home only 15, including a meagre three golds. This was an embarrassment to Russia, which was to host the next Winter Games, so Mr. Putin's ministers began to plot. In 2014, Russian athletes won 13 golds, and 33 medals overall. The cheating worked.
There is now a call to ban the entire Russian team from the Summer Olympics next month as a result of Mr. McLaren's findings, but that would be unfair to Russian athletes who are clean.
More urgent is the need to name names. Who were the 15 or so Russian medal winners whose samples were swapped out at Sochi? They should be immediately stripped of those medals.
As for the misbehaviour inside the Russian government, local authorities can look into it. Good luck with that, in Mr. Putin's Russia.