As Dr Ironfist, he dominated in the boxing ring. Now, Kyiv’s mayor is fighting for his city’s life

Gdansk: Vitali Klitschko knocked his opponents to the canvas as a world heavyweight champion. Now the former boxer, who has been the mayor of Kyiv for more than a decade, is adamant that Ukraine will stop Russia after four years of full-scale invasion.

“There is no other way,” he says.

Klitschko, one of Ukraine’s most powerful political figures, says the country will bring the Russian onslaught to a halt despite the nightly bombardments on civilian targets.

As the wartime leader of the nation’s capital, he is responsible for the emergency response to each attack and the essential services that support about 3 million people.

And his approach to defending his city is not too different from his style in the ring, where he was known as Dr Ironfist when he dominated the heavyweight division in the early to mid-2000s with his brother and fellow champion, Wladimir.

But he admits the losses are devastating and says the need for international support is just as great as it was when Russian President Vladimir Putin thought he could seize control of Kyiv in a matter of days in February 2022.

“We’re losing our infrastructure, and most importantly, we’re losing our people, our children,” Klitschko tells this masthead.

“Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children have been stolen by Russia. So the numbers are horrifying, the cases are horrifying, and the stories, too.

“Since 2022, in the full-scale war in Ukraine, Russia is trying to dominate, trying to basically erase the history of the country and its people and rewrite the history.

“So it’s not going to happen. It is not happening. We’re resilient, we’re fighting back, and we’re not going to give up.”

His comments highlight the outrage in Ukraine at the removal of children from occupied parts of the country and their transportation to Russia, where they have been taught Putin’s view of history: that Ukraine is not a separate country and merely land belonging to Russia.

The United Nations has verified the deportation or transfer of at least 1200 children from five regions in Ukraine. Other estimates put the number at more than 20,000. The UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine said the Russian policy was a violation of international law.

Klitschko and his brother, having prospered from their boxing careers, are now defined by their defence of Ukraine, a story told in a documentary – Klitschko: More Than A Fight – released two years ago.

Klitschko leads a foundation that has worked with international donors such as billionaire Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York. He has flown to world capitals to seek more civil and military support for Ukraine, and he has vowed to fight Russians if needed – even though on the fortune he made from boxing he could retire to a safe and comfortable hideaway.

This makes him a major political figure who can cause trouble for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. When Kyiv comes under attack and its citizens feel they need more help, Klitschko will criticise the president and do what it takes to get more support.

Some view him as a future president, given his national (and international) profile and his long time in politics. He became the mayor of Kyiv in 2014, one year after retiring from boxing, and seems to have an iron hold on the post. He was mentioned as a contender for the presidency in the lead-up to the national election in 2014, before deciding not to run.

In a rare interview with an Australian media outlet, in Poland on the sidelines of the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Gdansk, the Kyiv mayor thanks Australia for its support for Ukraine and says the war will have to continue until Putin is stopped.

“We will defend our right to live, we will defend our land, we will defend our right to live in the democratic, prosperous Ukraine,” he says. “And that’s going to happen. There is no other way.”

Is there anything Kyiv needs most urgently from outside Ukraine? The past four years have shown that no single kind of help is most important, he says, other than the effort to end the fighting.

“The only one thing that we need is to stop this war – that’s the only thing,” he says.

“I understand that we have to bully the bully, and in this case, Putin’s Russia is the bully, and we need support.

“We need military support, we need financial support, we need humanitarian support, we need to get our children back.”

He notes that Putin was not declared a war criminal for destroying city buildings and killing civilians, but for stealing Ukrainian children.

“So this war crime must be stopped. The war must be stopped. And Australians can do a lot. Thank you for your help and support you’ve been providing, but as I said, how much is enough?

“It’s never enough [when] these horrifying events, as I described just right now, are still happening.

“While we were here, while we talk about it, the war’s still going: daily bombardments, destruction. Obviously, the war takes the lives of our children, adults, our mothers, fathers, brothers of our civilians, and that must be stopped.”

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