Soccer's biggest annual game, the Champions League final, has been moved from Russia to France after Putin's invasion

• Russia has been stripped of the 2022 Champions League final, soccer's biggest annual match.
• The European soccer governing body UEFA said the game would move from St. Petersburg to Paris.

The European soccer governing body UEFA has confirmed that the 2022 Champions League final will no longer be played in Russia after President Vladimir Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine.

The annual showpiece event, which decides the best club soccer team in Europe, was set to be held at the Gazprom Arena in Russia's second city, St. Petersburg, on May 28.

It is now set to be held at the Stade de France in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis on the same date. The stadium hasn't hosted the Champions League final since 2006. It also played host to the 1998 FIFA World Cup final.

UEFA said in a statement that the decision to move the game had come after "the grave escalation of the security situation in Europe."

In the same statement, UEFA said all Russian and Ukrainian teams playing in European competitions would have to play home matches at neutral venues outside their home countries for the foreseeable future.

That decision at the moment would affect only one team, Spartak Moscow, which has qualified for the last 16 of the Europa League, the second-tier pan-European soccer tournament. Spartak usually plays its home games at the Otkrytie Bank Arena in the northwest of the Russian capital.

No Ukrainian teams are left in UEFA club competitions this season.

Russia launched a military assault in Ukraine on Thursday at about the same time as a television address from Putin.

Putin said in his address that Russian forces would strive for the "demilitarization" and "denazification" of Ukraine, whose president is Jewish.

Russia's conflict with Ukraine has been rumbling for years but escalated dramatically in recent weeks.

Russia assembled vast numbers of troops around Ukraine — as many as 190,000, per US estimates — in the largest military operation in the region since World War II.

On Monday, Putin recognized the claims to independence of the breakaway Luhansk and Donetsk areas of Ukraine, ordering troops there for what he described as a limited peacekeeping operation in the east of the country.

Less than 72 hours later, Putin authorized a full-scale attack on Ukraine. In the hours that followed, explosions pounded cities around Ukraine, many hundreds of miles from the previous conflict zone.

Ukrainian officials reported fighting on its borders with Russia, and dozens of casualties.

The new wave of hostilities expanded the clash from a limited incursion over disputed land into the most serious armed conflict in Europe in at least a decade.

Insider's live blog of the invasion is covering developments as they happen.