The International Olympic Committee has banned Ukrainian competitors at the Sochi winter Games from wearing black armbands to commemorate the deaths of protesters and police in Kiev.

The country's Olympic association said in a statement that it had asked the IOC if its competitors could mark the "deep pain over the loss of fellow countrymen" by wearing black armbands. "The answer was received from the IOC that in accordance with the Olympic charter it is not possible to do this."

Sponsor logos are everywhere at the Olympics, but the IOC regularly bans anything it deems to be political. It has also banned helmet sticker tributes to Sarah Burke, a skier who died in a 2012 accident, at Sochi.

Sergey Bubka, the Ukrainian pole-vaulting hero and leader of his country's delegation to Sochi, appealed on his Twitter account to both sides to stop the violence: "I want to bring Olympic truce to my country. Dialogue is power, violence is weakness," he wrote. "Our athletes are competing hard in Sochi, but peacefully and with honour. Violence has no place in the World."

Bubka is also a former MP for President Viktor Yanukovych's Party of Regions.

"Yes it's a distraction, everyone's talking about it. Even just now at the start, at the finish, people are saying 'what's happened in your country, what's happened?'" said Dmytro Mytsak, 18, a giant slalom skier from Kiev. "We're getting support from the Russian spectators and I'm grateful for that."

Ukrainian cross-country skiers Kateryna Serdyuk and Marina Lisogor pulled out of the women's team sprint classic event in which they were due to compete on Wednesday, but the Ukrainian delegation said that this was because of an injury to Serdyuk rather than for political reasons.

The IOC's spokesman, Mark Adams, reiterated on Wednesday that there was no place for political protests at the Olympics, and criticised the Italian transgender former MP, Vladimir Luxuria, who has been detained twice, once for displaying a rainbow flag that read "Gay is OK", and again for wearing a rainbow outfit inside one of the Olympic venues.

"She explicitly had said that she would demonstrate in a venue and clearly venues are not the place where we would like to have political demonstration," Adams said.

Asked about the detention for several hours of nine people including members of the punk group Pussy Riot on Tuesday, Adams said: "I understand that what happened yesterday wasn't in the context of any demonstration against the Games, so at the moment I don't have any relationship at all with that incident."