Russian football chief Vitaly Mutko has been barred from standing for re-election for a place on the FIFA Council due to his deputy prime-minister role in the country.
Mutko, who is also head of the Russian World Cup organising committee, has failed an eligibility test carried out by the FIFA review committee.
Sources close to the committee said that Mutko had been barred because his ministerial role contravened the statutes of the global soccer body and that the decision was not connected to the doping scandal which has engulfed Russian sport.
Mutko was Russia's Minister of Sport from 2008 until last October, when he was promoted to his current position.
Mutko shrugged off the decision, which he said would have no effect on the World Cup to be staged next year, and said he would not appeal.
"The committee's decision has no bearing on that," Mutko told the Russian news agency TASS.
"I wanted to be re-elected but now the FIFA... has somewhat changed the criteria. A new criteria, political neutrality, has been introduced. This is their right. This is public work, everything is normal."
Russian sport was rocked last year by the publication of the McLaren report, commission by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which detailed a system of state-sponsored doping in the country.
It said that Moscow had concealed hundreds of positive doping cases from a variety of sports, including soccer.
The report said that Russian Deputy Sports Minister Yuri Nagornykh had decided which athletes would benefit from a cover-up, known as a SAVE order, although Mutko, it alleged, appeared to make the decision with regard to footballers.
Nagornykh was dismissed in October. Mutko, who has denied wrongdoing, was among five candidates for four four-year term European places on the FIFA Council, which makes the key strategic decisions for the global soccer body.
The remaining four, who will now be elected unopposed, are Sandor Csyani (Hungary), Costakis Koutsokoumnis (Cyprus), Dejan Savicevic (Montenegro) and Geir Thorsteinsson (Iceland).
Mutko, 58, had sat on the Council since 2009, when it was known as the executive committee.
FIFA insists that the sport remains free of government interference. Article 23 of the FIFA statutes states that continental confederations such as UEFA must be "independent and avoid any form of political interference".
Article 19 also states that "each member association shall manage its affairs independently and without undue influence from third parties."
Although this is a long-standing rule, eligibility checks on candidates for office were only introduced last year in response to a corruption scandal.
The UEFA elections will take place at the UEFA Congress in Helsinki on April 5. Germany's Reinhard Grindel is the only candidate for a further European place, which has a two-year term.
