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“Well, OK, in my opinion, you are the same as if you had allowed Hitler’s supporters in,” Oleksandra Oliynykova, a 25-year-old Ukrainian tennis player, declared before the start of this year’s Australian Open. “Russians belong in hell—that’s my clear position.”

With these words, Oliynykova, who is ranked 71st in the world and was playing her first Australian Open, catapulted what had long been percolating into the public light: the ever-uglier acrimony between Ukrainian tennis players and their counterparts from Russia and Belarus who tie themselves too closely to their homelands’ belligerent regimes. The Ukrainian women in particular—such as former No. 3-ranked Elina Svitolina, top players like Marta Kostyuk and Dayana Yastremska, and now Oliynykova—are pushing the tennis world to take a tougher stance on the cruel four-year war that has devastated their country.

“Well, OK, in my opinion, you are the same as if you had allowed Hitler’s supporters in,” Oleksandra Oliynykova, a 25-year-old Ukrainian tennis player, declared before the start of this year’s Australian Open. “Russians belong in hell—that’s my clear position.”

With these words, Oliynykova, who is ranked 71st in the world and was playing her first Australian Open, catapulted what had long been percolating into the public light: the ever-uglier acrimony between Ukrainian tennis players and their counterparts from Russia and Belarus who tie themselves too closely to their homelands’ belligerent regimes. The Ukrainian women in particular—such as former No. 3-ranked Elina Svitolina, top players like Marta Kostyuk and Dayana Yastremska, and now Oliynykova—are pushing the tennis world to take a tougher stance on the cruel four-year war that has devastated their country.

Russia’s assault on Ukraine burst onto the courts immediately after the full-scale invasion began in 2022. The Ukrainians stopped shaking hands with Russian and Belarusian players after matches (Russian troops invaded northern Ukraine from Belarus. Belarusian solders did not participate—at least not under Belarus’s flag—but the authoritarian Belarusian government is a close ally of Russia).

That year, the Wimbledon Championships banned all players from Russia and Belarus who refused to explicitly condemn their governments, rationalizing the move as “not allowing sport to be used to promote the Russian regime.” It noted how Russia and Belarus regularly exploit their most decorated athletes to champion their leaderships and legitimize the state. “Why, after all, should it be allowed to glory in its sporting achievements when thousands of innocents have been slaughtered and millions have fled?” opined The Guardian in support.

The Wimbledon ban ruptured the tennis world: Nordic and Central European players such as Iga Swiatek (Poland) and Petra Kvitova (Czech Republic) approved, while dozens of others objected, including the three largest professional tennis associations, which sanctioned the Wimbledon event. Shortly thereafter, however, the big three passed their own prohibition on players who represent Russia and Belarus, emphasizing the flag they play under, not their nationality as such, and requiring no criticism of the war. (The associations, however, cautioned players not to take it any further and underscored the prohibition against bringing politics onto the court or into the post-match press conferences.)

In response to the sanction, many Russian and Belarusian players switched nationalities—most to Central Asian countries but also Australia, Austria, and France, among others—or they played under no flag at all, like Belarusian Aryna Sabalenka, who is No.1-ranked in women’s singles, and Russian Daniil Medvedev, who is ranked No. 11 in men’s singles.

The Moscow-born Elena Rybakina—the 2026 Australian Open champion who bested Sabalenka—switched from Russia to Kazakhstan in 2018, not out of politics but due to Russia’s reluctance to support her as a young, modestly hailed athlete. Rybakina lives in Dubai but proudly burnishes her Kazakh citizenship. She did not, however, jettison her Russian passport as others have, such as Daria Kasatkina, who defected from Russia in 2025 to become an Australian citizen so that she could live as an openly gay person. Kasatkina is one of the few Russian-born players who publicly chastise Russian President Vladimir Putin and called the war in Ukraine a “full-blown nightmare.”

But much of this nationality switching—and vague calls for peace—happened when the war was still young. The 2026 Australian Open took place just weeks before the war passed the four-year mark, which is longer than the duration of World War I, and it occurred during an unparalleled Russian onslaught against Ukraine’s civilian population that left many without heat or power in subzero weather. The war is estimated to have cost the lives of more than 1.8 million people.

In Oliynykova’s broadside, the Ukrainian players’ frustration with the world of professional tennis boiled over. Oliynykova, after a first-round loss, showed up to her post-match press conference in a T-shirt that read: “I need your help to protect Ukrainian women and children, but I can’t talk about it here.” This message was directed at the tennis world’s timidity about going further than the 2022 bans, which look increasingly flimsy in light of the dramatic events on the ground.

The straight-talking Oliynykova, who exhibited body tattoos on her neck and arms, face jewelry, and flowers painted across her cheeks, told the press that if they wanted to speak with her about the war, then they’d have to do it off the premises of the Australian Open’s venue—those being the (ridiculous) rules, she appeared to imply. The night before she left from Kyiv, her hometown, for Australia, a Russian missile had struck so close to her family’s apartment that it shook the bed beneath her. “I know how people can help to protect Ukrainians, to protect them against these drones, but we will need to speak outside about this,” she said.

Oliynykova bemoaned that her father, her greatest supporter, could not be at her Australian debut because, as a member of Ukraine’s 412th Separate Brigade of Unmanned Systems, he was out defending the country. “His combat team works every day to stop Russian attacks and protect Ukrainian cities and villages,” she said. A website she created crowdfunds donations for her father’s unit. The website “is how I connect my tennis world with his frontline reality. Together with friends and supporters, we raise funds for mission-critical equipment that helps his unit see further, react faster, and come home alive.”

Off the Australian Open’s grounds, Oliynykova talked politics straight-up. The tennis associations, she explained, say, “Everything is great, we’re ‘apolitical’ here, we’re just here to play tennis.” But this way, she continued, “they allow real Putin supporters, people who support genocide, support war, who are absolutely horrible, who convert what the [Women’s Tennis Association] allows them to earn into killing the peaceful population of Ukraine. They convert their publicity to help spread Putin’s propaganda.”

As for the Russian and Belarusian players themselves, Oliynykova said that those who protest too meekly—or worse, carry water for the perpetrators—should be disqualified outright. The Ukrainian players not only refuse to shake hands on the court, but apparently the air in the locker rooms, too, can be sliced with a knife. The Ukrainians want the professional tennis world to require all players to sign a written declaration condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a condition for participation and foreswear state funding of any kind. In the 2026 Winter Olympics, Russians and Belarusians will compete under the same conditions they did at the 2024 Paris Olympics—as individual neutrals without flags, emblems, or anthems of their country.

Oliynykova and her compatriots don’t throw all Russians and Belarusians into the same pot. They single out Sabalenka, who has won four Grand Slam titles and a record-setting $15 million in 2025. The 27-year-old, who was born in Minsk, Belarus, and now resides in Miami, has connections to Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko that reach back a decade, not least because the Belarusian state backed her career from day one. She is regularly rolled out by Lukashenko, an autocrat who has been in power even longer than Putin, for propaganda purposes. In 2020, during nationwide mass protests against rigged presidential elections, Sabalenka signed a letter that conspicuously avoided any criticism of Lukashenko. In 2021, on the heels of violent repression of these protests in Belarus, she was a guest at Lukashenko’s New Year address. In 2023, journalists pressed Sabalenka on whether she supported Lukashenko, and she responded, “It’s a tough question. I mean, I don’t support war, meaning I don’t support Lukashenko right now.” This is as far she’s ever gone.

Diana Shnaider, a 21-year-old player who assumed Austrian citizenship in 2025, and Mirra Andreeva, an 18-year-old, have been called out for accepting Putin’s honors after the pair won a silver medal in women’s doubles at the 2024 Paris Olympics—though they competed under a neutral flag. Last November, Shnaider and Medvedev played at a tennis event in St. Petersburg that was funded by Gazprom—Russia’s state-owned energy corporation that is central to its war effort. Even the fact that athletes compete without a flag on international tennis courts doesn’t stop Putin and Lukashenko from using them for their ends.

Russian and Belarusian players gripe that they alone are forced to take political stands against their homelands while other nationals are not. When asked at the Australian Open about U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, American player Amanda Anisimova responded, “I don’t think that’s relevant.”

© Foreign Policy