Last week news broke that Strikeforce’s heavyweight star and former Pride champ Fedor Emelianenko, would be running for a seat in the Russian Parliament and would be retiring from MMA. Luckily for us, that report was wrong.

Yes, Fedor is actively involved with Russian politics and is looking to run for a seat, but M-1 Global’s Director of Operations, Evgeni Kogan, stated that the rumors of retirement are completely false.

“He was basically nominated as one of the 58 candidates in the Belgorod Region, to be a candidate for the ruling party, for the Russian ruling party essentially. As far as I know, after he won a seat in the Russian Parliament or Senate, and it just kind of exploded from there.

There’s no substance to them at all,” Kogan said about retirement talk. “He was nominated, I’m pretty sure he didn’t nominate himself, so he was nominated by other people. He is one of a number of a dozen people in the same position, and even if he goes through the duties that he would have to undertake as part of that role, it would be negligible.

His career continues as it has been continuing for the last however many years. So there’s no retirement plan coming up.”

Fedor will be taking on Brazilian Febricio Werdum at the Strikeforce event “Fedor vs. Werdum” on June 26th.