Why Ukraine’s Boxing Champ Cannot Lose / The Times

Outside the Ukrainian embassy in London’s Holland Park a convoy of 50 trucks, four-wheel drives, ambulances and a solitary red bus is about to depart for Ukraine. Most have been donated through the ULEZ scrappage scheme. The vehicles will be used to ferry supplies to, and stricken soldiers from, the war’s front line until they themselves are, inevitably, destroyed by Russian missiles.

A man who knows all about fighting has come to speed the convoy on its way. Oleksandr Usyk, Ukraine’s undisputed heavyweight boxing champion of the world, delivers a short speech in which he thanks the British people for so steadfastly supporting his country. But later, during an hour-long interview inside the embassy, his praise for Britain is somewhat less effusive.

The 37-year-old champ who has won all 22 of his professional fights, 14 of them through knockouts, pummels me with questions of his own. “How many Russian schools are there in London?,” he asks through an interpreter. “Four,” he tells me. “How many Russian schools are there in Britain? Twenty four!”

Britain is being used by Putin’s cronies, he says. They mock us behind our backs. “Russian exiles who were chased from Russia and sought political asylum - that’s one thing. But when it comes to people very close to Russia’s top management who can easily live here, spend their money, send their kids to schools and universities and keep supporting the regime, that’s something that has to be taken care of.”

On the subject of apparent western appeasement, I ask Usyk about Donald Trump’s threat to end America’s support for Ukraine if he regains the White House, and to compel his homeland to trade land for peace. Is Trump, the man who exhorted his followers to “fight, fight, fight” after his attempted assassination last week, actually suggesting that Ukraine surrenders the Russian-occupied Crimean and Donbas regions? 

Usyk professes to know little about Trump or politics, but he insists that the West cannot allow Russia to set a precedent by forcibly seizing disputed territories, and that “the best sons of Ukraine are already buried in the soil. In their names you can’t just give territory away.”  

The West has already “betrayed” Ukraine once, he argues with some justification. In the 1990s, following the Soviet Union’s collapse, it offered Ukraine security assurances if it gave up its nuclear arsenal but failed to prevent Russia’s invasion.

Usyk is wearing a traditional embroidered Ukrainian shirt over his formidable torso, and sports a hefty watch and silver earring. He is handsome, direct and charismatic. He veers between joviality and solemnity, but there is no mistaking his deep, smouldering rage at the wanton destruction that Russia has visited on Ukraine, at its egregious violation of what might be termed the Marquis of Queensbury rules of warfare.

He tells me, for example, that he would not fight a Russian boxer - even if there was one good enough to challenge him. He believes that all Russian athletes should be barred from the Paris Olympic Games because it is impossible to tell the good ones from the bad.

His anger is fuelled by bitter personal experiences. As he proceeds to tell me, the Russians have driven him from one home, trashed another, killed close friends, endangered his wife and four children and caused his compatriots untold suffering - all because their “mentally sick president” is obsessed with becoming a 21st century “tsar”.

He believes the Russians would like to assassinate him for being so outspoken, as they have so many of its other prominent critics overseas. But he will not be intimidated. A devout Christian, he insists that God protects him. “The one who’s scared is the one who dies,” he declares. 

Usyk was raised in Crimea, and was living there when he won gold at the 2012 London Olympics. He returned home shortly after his beloved father died, and placed the medal in his hand as he lay in his coffin. Two years later Russia annexed Crimea. 

He and his family moved to Kyiv, occasionally returning to Crimea until “certain people from the (Russian) secret services started some negative actions against me and I realised it was dangerous”. They threatened to burn his Land Cruiser, removed his portrait from public places and stripped him of various honours. “They call me Nazi but I am not a Nazi,” he states emphatically in English. His home in Simferopol is now occupied by others. 

On February 24 2022 the Russians invaded Ukraine. Usyk was making a video game, Undisputed, in Sheffield. “It’s started,” his wife, Yekaterina, messaged him. “I felt desperate because I was unable to help my family,” he said. He flew directly to Warsaw, all flights to Ukraine having been cancelled, and drove the 500 miles to Kyiv without stopping. He passed long lines of cars, filled with families and possessions, fleeing Ukraine. His was the only car going the other way. “It was unbelievable in the 21st century that kind of war can occur,” he said.

Two days later Usyk joined the territorial defence force, armed with guns from his personal  collection. He patrolled his neighbourhood’s main roads as columns of Russian tanks approached the capital, and feared he would have to confront them face to face. He lost ten kilos in a month, and shows me a photo on his mobile phone of his then-skinny body. 

The invasion stalled before Kyiv fell, but Russian soldiers did occupy and trash his country home in Vorzel, north west of the capital. They left him “some presents” - two booby-trapped hand-grenades - and killed many of his neighbours.

After a month Usyk took the “extremely difficult” decision to leave the defence force and resume his boxing career. He says he did so after visiting a military hospital in Lviv and meeting soldiers wounded during the bloody siege of Mariupol. “They explained to me that as a soldier I would not be able to do as much for my country as I would as a boxer,” he said. “They told me ‘we need a victory. You have to go and get a victory’.”

The soldiers were right. Usyk could achieve much more by fighting in the ring than on the battlefield. He obtained a special permit from the Ministry of Sports to leave the country at a time when most young Ukrainian men were barred from doing so, and resumed training. 

That August he beat Britain’s Anthony Joshua in Saudi Arabia. A year later he beat another Brit, Daniel Dubois, in Poland, and in May this year he returned to Saudi Arabia to take on Britain’s Tyson Fury.

He draped himself in Ukrainian yellow and blue. At his own expense, he flew two dozen maimed Ukrainian soldiers to Riyadh to watch. As with the Joshua fight, he bought the Ukrainian television rights so his battered, war-wearied countrymen could watch the fight for free. Millions did, including many frontline soldiers in their trenches and bunkers.

Just as Ukraine’s military is far smaller than Russia’s, so Usyk was far smaller (or less huge) than Fury - 38 pounds lighter and six inches shorter, to be exact.  But like Ukraine’s military he compensated with speed, technical skill and sheer grit.

The fight was a classic. In the ninth round Fury was reeling but saved by the bell. After 12 rounds Usyk was declared the winner on a split decision, and became the world’s first undisputed heavyweight champion in 25 years.

Ukraine rejoiced. Messages from soldiers poured in - he reads me one saying ‘Oleks, you’re f…ing great!”. Another clip on his mobile shows the residents of a Kyiv apartment block erupting with joy. President Zelensky declared: “The Ukrainians hit hard! And in the end, all our opponents will be defeated.” The new champ dedicated his victory to “my God, my supporters, my country, the Ukrainian soldiers, Ukrainian mothers and fathers, children.”

His fight with Fury was a “one-way ticket,” Usyk tells me with a chuckle. “I had no chance to lose. My country needed a victory. The guys defending my country needed a victory.”  

The benefits of Usyk’s rise to stardom have been incalculable. At home he visits the front line, hospitals and other institutions to raise morale. Next week he will be in Paris to support the 140 Ukrainians who have overcome all manner of adversity to qualify for the Olympics. He has launched a foundation which has to date raised $750,000 for the armed forces, provided nearly 100 vehicles and ambulances and delivered 520 tons of humanitarian aid, according to its website. Some of that money was raised by auctioning boxing memorabilia. 

He says he has given more than $1 million of his own money to projects including hospital generators, a children’s centre and the rebuilding of a block of flats in the Kyiv suburb of Irpin where his friend, Oleksii Dzhunkivskyi, ran a boxing gym for youngsters before he was killed by Russian soldiers.

Internationally he uses his celebrity to act as a roving ambassador for Ukraine, to draw attention to his country’s plight at a time when he fears the West is wearying of the war and more focussed on the conflict in Gaza. “I use boxing as a media platform to deliver the truth to the world…and counter enemy propaganda,” he says.

His interview with The Times is a case in point. He tells me life for many of his compatriots is “like the 18th century…people don’t have water, light, food, electricity”. 

He describes how Ukrainian children can now identify incoming Russian rockets by the sounds they make, and how one missile landed so close to his daughter’s school that the walls shook and a curtain rail fell on her.   

He talks of friends killed or maimed on the front lines, and how he feels a part of himself dies each time one of them sacrifices his life for his country. “They were young guys, some with new-born kids,” he says. If you lose a boxing match life goes on, but “on the frontline if you lose you’re dead”.

He describes how, earlier this month, he rushed to the Okhmatdyt children's hospital in Kyiv after it had been destroyed by a Russian missile strike, and was moved to tears. “When you see those small human beings who need special care in special conditions, some of them on dialysis, and some had lived there for years, and they’re sitting outside on the street and just waiting…it’s hard to see and I can’t imagine how they bear that.” 

How will the war end, I ask a man who is well used to fighting to the limits of human endurance? “With victory for Ukraine,” he replies emphatically. “There’s no alternative for Ukrainians. Where should they go? Where should they live? This is the land where they were brought up. It’s just impossible to give up.”