In January, Sergiy Stakhovsky was wielding a tennis racket at the Australian Open. Today, in Kyiv, he holds a Kalashnikov.
Asked whether he feels ready to use it against Russian soldiers, the Ukrainian smiles for a moment. “If you go on to a tennis court for a week, are you going to be ready for a grand slam tournament?” Stakhovsy asks.
He hopes that he is the “last resort” when it comes to shooting to kill but he is ready to do whatever it takes to defend his country. He has already shown that commitment by leaving his wife and three children in Budapest to put on a military uniform, help the war effort and draw attention to the “slaughter” of his compatriots.
Talking on Zoom from the room he shares with a colleague in the Kyiv reservist unit, Stakhovsky is on a break from his regular armed patrol — “I would rather not say exactly where” — and helping to put together military shipments to send to the front line.
The conversation feels surreal for both of us. In other circumstances, Stakhovsky might be reflecting on the day he knocked Roger Federer out of Wimbledon in 2013, while ranked 116th in the world — one of the more remarkable shocks in grand slam tennis of the past decade. He might be enjoying his $5.5 million in prize money.
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He might be talking about the project recently agreed with President Zelensky to establish a world-class programme for the country’s tennis players before the Paris Olympics in 2024. They had planned to launch the project earlier this month.
Instead, Zelensky leads his people against an invading army and Stakhovsky is on armed patrol in Kyiv, trying not to be overcome with emotion as he sees thousands of distraught refugees pour in from bombed cities.
“When you see them come in, they have nothing,” he says. “They lost their house, their car, maybe even their coat, all their possessions. They come in empty.
“Believe me, it’s tough. So thank you to Great Britain, Poland and any country taking refugees because these people have been through hell.”
The fear he felt when he flew back to Ukraine after a family holiday in Dubai has turned to rage when he sees this human devastation at first hand. “The atrocities they [Russia] commit on a daily basis,” he says.
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“They use tactics which are to kill — not kill, slaughter — as many people as they can because we can’t call it otherwise when they bombard Mariupol with civilians in it [and] Kharkiv the same thing. So it’s not a war, it’s a slaughterhouse where they try to spread fear and destruction. But seeing Ukraine, how people are motivated to fight, it’s also inspirational.
“We can see that Russia expected to sweep Ukraine in two days. Now we are on day 22 and they are nowhere near sweeping anything. On the ground, [Russian] morale is disastrous. Ukraine forces are like a small needle piercing them straight in the heart.”
Stakhovsky, 36, says that he always worried about a Russian incursion but never imagined that Putin would launch such bloody mayhem. The athlete, born in 1986, was five when Ukraine voted for independence from Russia.
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The son of a professor of urology and a mother who taught economics at university in Kyiv — both now out of the country — he says that he overcame a lot of people telling him he would never make it as a tennis player to reach the US Open junior final in 2004, losing to Andy Murray.
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Standing at 6ft 4ins, he climbed to 31st in the world, won titles, played on all the sport’s biggest stages, including the Davis Cup for his country. He lived a jet-set life including four years in London.
After retiring at the Australian Open in January, he imagined a pleasant life developing his tennis centre in Kyiv, assisting the country’s best players, while running a vineyard in the west of Ukraine.
Instead, he is left fearing two years of harvest might go to waste because the factory that produces the bottles has been destroyed, while his family, including his wife who is Russian-Hungarian, sit in Budapest terrified for him.
“Having three kids, with my wife worrying daily, it’s hard to justify being here,” he says. “You don’t know when a missile could fly into any building. It’s roulette. But she understands why and that I couldn’t do it any other way.
“Talk to family and you think you should be with them. But if I was with them I would also feel I should be in Ukraine.”
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Like other sports stars, including Oleksandr Usyk, the heavyweight champion boxer, he could not stay away and watch his country be destroyed.
Stakhovsky has been posting on Instagram and receiving support from fellow tennis players, including Novak Djokovic who has offered to help financially. As an elite athlete, he believes that he can use his profile to draw attention to the barbarism.
“It’s my understanding from all that Putin has said that if he conquered Ukraine he would wipe it from the maps and the history books like it never existed,” he says. “He would deport anyone left here to Siberia and people from Siberia to here to control it. So it is genocidal. His main goal is to denationalise Ukraine. Imagine trying to denationalise Britain.”
He reads that it is Putin’s war, not Russia’s, and says that he must disagree. “You see athletes wearing the ‘Z’ and schools putting up the ‘Z’,” he says. “You can say it’s Putin’s war but we are fighting Russians.
“Of course they are being told completely different things by the propaganda machine, that Nato is lying, that they don’t kill civilians, that we kill our own civilians so there are generations growing up on these lies. But we have to fight that too.”
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He wants sanctions against Russia, both sporting and financial, to be strengthened. “The way Russia is being thrown out of the world community is the only way to show that they need to sort everything within Russia too.”
Before heading back out on patrol, Stakhovsky says it is a strange existence in Kyiv. A curfew was lifted this week and many shops and cafes reopened. People are trying to go about business as usual.
“The traffic was coming in, people were in coffee shops but they also understand there is a threat of shells and bombs from the air,” he says.
“A full-scale assault, an invasion from Russia, this is something you couldn’t believe. And the way they did it, and continue it, I am really not sure how this ends.
“Talks? We already lost a tremendous amount of civilian people, women, kids who had no part of this war at all. So what is the trade? If Russia wants Donetsk and Luhansk republic, and reassurance that Crimea stays with Russia and Ukraine is going to disarm itself, that’s a road to no talking at all.”
In his perfect English, Stakhovsky talks with absolute certainty that Russia will be defeated but he knows there will be much more suffering before that day. “And Putin has nuclear weapons and no one knows what he is capable of,” he says.
As long as the threat remains, this tennis player will be picking up his rifle and wondering if the time will come when he has to fire it.
