Ukrainian city Lviv has become the third city to pull out of the bidding process to host the 2022 Winter Olympics.

The city’s bid had been put into doubt by the political crisis in Ukraine, which erupted earlier this year.

The decision to withdraw the bid was made on Monday 30 June following talks between Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyukin and Ukraine National Olympic Committee president Sergey Bubka.

Following the talks, Bach said: "The preliminary evaluation by the IOC’s working group found that the Lviv bid offered huge potential for future development.

“In my discussions with the Ukrainian prime minister and NOC president, we concluded that it would be extremely difficult to pursue the 2022 bid under the current circumstances but that a future bid would make sense for Ukraine and Ukrainian sport.”

The announcement comes a week before the IOC's ruling Executive Board will meet to draw up the final shortlist of official Candidate Cities.

The cancellation of the Lviv bid means that from the original six applicant cities only three remain to be considered for the short list.

Swedish capital Stockholm dropped its bid in January 2014 due to “lack of political support”, while Polish city Krakow’s hopes of hosting the Games were thwarted by a referendum in which nearly 70 per cent of citizen’s voted against the bid.

The three remaining cities bidding for the 2022 Games are Beijing, China; Almaty, Kazakhstan; and Oslo, Norway.

It is rumoured, however, that Oslo too could be on the brink of withdrawing its bid due to insufficient political support for organising the Games.

Any further cancellation of bids could make the process problematic for the IOC, which usually chooses three candidate cities from a longlist of up to 10 applicants.

There were a total of seven applicant cities bidding for the Sochi 2014 Games, of which three were selected as official candidate cities. For the 2010 Winter Olympics, the final shortlist of three was chosen from eight applicant cities.