They are the legendary boxing brothers turned political heavyweights. Vitali is mayor of Kyiv; Wladimir is a special envoy for Ukraine. Now, two and a half years after Putin’s invasion of their country, they’re battling the biggest fight of their lives.
It’s a pavement-cracking mid-July day in Kyiv and, in front of the powder blue baroque of St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, in a square now serving as a museum of captured Russian military vehicles, we are conducting the fastest of photoshoots. Not merely because it is 37C, humid as a swamp, and even our photographer’s camera is overheating ominously, but because our subjects, Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko, former world heavyweight boxing champions turned political heavyweights, quickly get mobbed wherever they go. And, with a combined height of almost 14ft, it’s not easy to move around stealthily with Ukraine’s most celebrated siblings.
Sure enough, within minutes, members of the public are sidling up between the rusty tanks for selfies. And, once we’ve got our shot, the Klitschkos cheerfully oblige. “Safest place in Kyiv,” beams Vitali — who, for the past decade has served as mayor of the city — as a woman and her young daughter squeeze between the gargantuan brothers. It’s difficult to imagine Sadiq Khan getting pestered for pictures in quite the same way.
Until January 2022, Wladimir was based mainly in the US and in Germany, where he had spent most of his boxing career and where both brothers enjoy huge fame and popularity, but, as the threat of an invasion loomed, he returned to Ukraine and is part of the Kyiv Territorial Defence Brigade.
But thanks to his sporting profile, he also serves as a special envoy for Ukraine, a secret diplomatic weapon dispatched to raise money and resources. In early March 2022, just two weeks into the war, the brothers had already raised €100 million ($181m) of support for Ukraine via a fundraising campaign in Germany.
“Those of us who were living outside Ukraine came [back] to defend Ukraine, to defend the right of living under democracy not dictatorship,” says Wladimir. “When your neighbours, your relatives, your friends are getting murdered, raped, and your country and your way of living, your infrastructure, is getting destroyed, it’s just not right.” And, he adds, “If we fail, you’re going to be next. I know it’s not pleasant. I know it’s heavy; I know it’s expensive. But it’s going to knock on your doorand it’s going to be too late.”
A couple of mornings earlier, I had bumped into Vitali in a gym and sweatily introduced myself. Instead of the boulders I had expected to find him bench-pressing, he was twirling tiny weights around delicately, as if in majorette training. Nonetheless, he is in unfeasibly strapping shape at 53, and Wladimir similarly so at 48.
Sitting opposite me now across a vast conference table, back in Vitali’s air-conditioned office at Kyiv city council, everything about them both is huge, from the four enormous exposed forearms and biceps that could crack walnuts to their big boxers’ noses and their giant shovel hands.
Dr Steelhammer and Dr Ironfist, as they were nicknamed in their boxing days — a reference to both their PhDs as well as their toughness in the ring — may look so similar that even locals confuse them, but are quite different characters. Wladimir, confidently fluent in English — along with German, Russian and Ukrainian — is wry but reserved, while Vitali, whose English is more idiosyncratic and occasionally poetic, projects an image of aloofness, but quickly shows himself to be warm and even goofy. “I’m very famous for the jokes,” he says. “I like jokes very much.”
Now, the pair are the subject of a new documentary, Klitschko: More Than a Fight, directed by the Oscar-winning Scot Kevin Macdonald. Even Vitali recognises that theirs is “a very unusual story. Two brothers, both successful in sport — the same sport. And we’re never fighting,” he says. “We’re competing, but we try to compete to help each other. I know, when my brother is close to me, my back is covered.”
We are just metres from Independence Square, scene of the 2013 and 2014 Maidan protests against Viktor Yanukovych, the president at the time, in which Vitali took a leading role, and which is now a makeshift memorial of thousands of blue and yellow flags to honour the Ukrainian soldiers and civilians killed since Russia invaded on February 24, 2022.
But residents of Kyiv are — on the surface at least — defiantly living life. Its pavement cafés and bars are buzzing and, on a balmy summer night, you could almost be in any other historic, increasingly hip middle European city. But, that is, for the curfew, the holes in the sides of buildings, the armed soldiers strolling down the street, the sudden, widespread and lengthy power blackouts and the multiple daily (and night-time) air raid alarms.
“You came to Kyiv right now and you have the illusion of peaceful time,” says Vitali. “Blue sky, sunshine, a lot of people in the street. But just a couple of hundred kilometres south or east is horrible. Destroyed buildings, villages, bombing, artillery, shooting, killing.”
“You are in a city that was supposed to be conquered,” says Wladimir. But, he adds, “It’s very fragile. A week ago with Okhmatdyt, it was the same way. Beautiful sunny day. Boom. Within three minutes of the air siren, the hospital was destroyed, lives were taken. Not just some lives, children.” On July 8, Russian missiles hit the Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital, the country’s biggest paediatric unit, killing two and injuring dozens more.
Almost 900 buildings have been destroyed so far in Kyiv and more than 200 civilians killed. “And every day, sometimes twice, three times a day, we listen to the air raid alarm, which means everyone has to go to the bunker, because safety right now is the main priority for everyone,” says Vitali.
But two and a half years into the war, people are less compliant. Many do not head to the shelters with every air raid alarm. When, in the small hours, I dutifully leave my bed for the makeshift shelter in the hotel’s basement, there’s only ever one other guest down there. The air defence system is working, locals say. On my final night in Kyiv, a drone is intercepted just above the left bank of the river, with the explosion audible across the city. The night after that, 35 Russian drones are shot down.
All of which means Vitali’s role as mayor is a curious one. He is, by turns, a paternal figurehead and cheerleader, boosting morale and offering comfort as he tours bombsites and hospitals and attends funerals, alongside dealing with the mundanity of metropolitan mayoring: planning meetings, roads, playgrounds.
Locals I meet grumble about his leadership and management, about all the money and attention being spent on the war effort when there’s nowhere to park. He has, some say, done nothing about the city’s crumbling transport infrastructure — the lack of bridges, the ancient yellow buses — but allowed developers to build gleaming “monuments to greed”.
“For everything that happens in the city, the mayor is guilty,” says Vitali. “One of the jokes that I make is: it’s snowing, the mayor is guilty. Raining, too much water, the mayor is responsible. Windy, trees go down, also the mayor’s responsibility. Sunshine, blue sky, great weather, nobody says, ‘Thank you, Mayor.’ The mayor is the crisis manager.”
These days, he no longer dresses quite as one would imagine a mayor might, for the planning meetings and the fundraisers, but rather looks ready for combat, with a wardrobe of snug black T-shirts, khaki trousers and matching bomber jackets.”It is my special uniform now,” he says. ‘Before the war, I had a lot of suits and ties, but it’s not comfortable to go to bombed buildings on fire [in those]. And every day, I don’t know where I will have to go in a couple of hours.”
The week before we meet, 32 world leaders pledged ongoing support for Ukraine at the Nato summit in Washington DC. Sir Keir Starmer repeated the new government’s commitment to spending £3 billion ($5.4b) a year on aid for Ukraine for “as long as it takes”, while President Biden pledged to provide Ukraine with five new strategic air defence systems.
“OK, lots of promises,” says Wladimir. “Verbally. Maybe we’re going to get some of the weapons. Maybe F-16s tomorrow. Maybe six of them, maybe thirty of them. But on 2,000 kilometres of front line? It’s not much. Yes, we’re getting help and support, but how much is enough? It’s never enough as long as this senseless war is still going. And war is expensive. For morale, for finances, for lives — everything.”
Much was also made at the Nato summit of the organisation seeking to “Trump-proof” itself against the former president’s potential re-election in November. On the day I meet the Klitschkos, Trump, having narrowly escaped assassination days earlier, is receiving a near-messianic reception at the Republican national convention, alongside his newly minted running mate, JD Vance, a man who has openly stated, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine, one way or the other,” and who played a key role in delaying a US$60b ($99.5b) military aid package from Washington.
Vitali is surprisingly optimistic on the subject. “The lesson that I have learnt in sport: never, ever talk about the decision before the fight. Let’s see the decision of the American people [as to] who will be president of the United States,” he says. “If Ukraine loses, we all lose democracy. And Republicans or Democrats, they need a success story about peace in Ukraine, about democracy in the world,” he continues. “If Ukraine is not successful in this war, it will be a painful story, not just for Europe, for the United States and for the leader of the United States.
“If Trump does win the race, he will totally change his politics, his official position on Ukraine,” he asserts.
While Putin’s forces are now their foe, the Klitschkos are half-Russian by birth — their mother, Nadiya, is from Siberia — and Russian is their first language. Their Ukrainian father, Vladimir, served in the Soviet army, and Vitali and Wladimir were born on military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan respectively.
Vitali tells a story about his parents asking if he wanted a brother, then telling him to collect coins as they’d have to buy him, before visiting his mother in hospital with “this small package. I was so excited.”
Excitement soon turned to childish resentment. “I’m not the centre of the universe and the whole attention goes to this small boy and I was very upset,” admits Vitali, albeit fondly. “It was very painful. I told Mother, ‘Listen, you don’t like me any more, you like him, and I’m feeling alone.’ I have to live with this new world where much more attention is not to me, but to my brother.” As they grew up, Vitali claims that while he worked hard for everything, things came easily to the younger Klitschko. “Yes,” Wladimir agrees with a laugh.
Vladimir was a strict disciplinarian. In the Klitschko household, “We received every day tasks from our parents, what we have to do, and in the evening we have to give a report, what we did or did not do,” recalls Vitali. “If we didn’t do something, I was always guilty — and my butt would feel that.”
“Everything was lots of drills, lots of discipline,” says Wladimir. Before their father’s funeral, when the brothers were setting out the uniform in which he would be buried, Wladimir recalled being woken up in the night and punished when his father’s shoes were not sufficiently clean and polished. He looked at his father’s shoes, ready for the funeral, “and I’m thinking, ‘I’d better clean them, otherwise he’s going to haunt me all my life — “They put me in the casket in dirty shoes.” ' "
But that strict discipline has served them well, they believe — in boxing and beyond. “When you get used to it, when you do it from childhood, you can’t do it differently,” says Wladimir. “When you’re disciplined, it’s a habit.”
Their father died in 2011. Having been among those dispatched to oversee the containment of the disaster at Chernobyl, one of the so-called “liquidators”, he later developed lymph node cancer, linked to his exposure to radioactive fallout.
As young teenagers under a Soviet regime, the brothers learnt to handle grenades and fire AK47s, while some sports — including martial arts, bodybuilding and professional boxing — were banned, which, the Klitschkos attest, only made them more alluring. “The Iron Curtain worked pretty well,” says Vitali. “We’d heard the name Muhammad Ali, but we’d never seen his face.”
Moving bases every couple of years, the brothers sampled a succession of activities laid on to keep the resident children out of trouble. “That’s why I started with photography. And the next military base, it was go-karting,” says Vitali. He was 12 when he first tried boxing.
By 1996, Vitali was on track to represent the newly independent Ukraine at the Atlanta Olympics — the first time the country had appeared under its own flag. But he tested positive for a banned substance, received a two-year suspension and was ejected from the national team. (He has always claimed he took the substance unknowingly after being prescribed medication for a leg injury.) He suggested his younger brother — by now a boxer himself too — go in his place. Wladimir took home the gold medal.
I ask Vitali if it hurt to miss out, and there follows an entertaining exchange in which he admits — apparently for the first time — that he was envious. After much back and forth, Vitali concludes that the gold medal is actually his. “I won.”
The brothers are appalled by the decision to allow Russian athletes to compete at this year’s Olympic Games as individual neutral athletes. “Disgusting decision,” spits Wladimir. “They’re still Russians. And going back home, they’ll be part of Russian propaganda.”
He is adamant that politics and sports are indivisible. “Politics and the Olympics have always been a tool, since Nazi Germany and the Olympics in Berlin,” he says. “Always used for political reasons.”
Post-Atlanta, the Klitschkos’ boxing careers took off in tandem. They moved to Germany, from where they dominated heavyweight boxing for more than a decade, with 2005 to 2016 becoming known as the “Klitschko era”. In 47 fights, Vitali won 45, all but four by knockout, while he himself was never knocked out. Wladimir, meanwhile, is considered to be one of the greatest heavyweight champions of all time.
Beyond the ring, the brothers also fulfilled their role as sporting superstars estimably; Vitali married the model Natalija Jehorova, with whom he has three children, while Wladimir has a daughter with his former fiancée, the Hollywood actress Hayden Panettiere.
Do they miss boxing? “I don’t miss boxing at all,” says Wladimir without hesitation. “I started when I was 14 and I stopped when I was 41. Enough is enough. It’s full of challenges, full of joy, full of pain that is fear leaving your body.”
“I miss training camps. I miss the competition feeling. I miss adrenaline. But I don’t miss the boxing exercise,” says Vitali. “Because 25 years, it’s like prison. Morning, evening, discipline, no restaurants, no cafés, no discotheques, no parties, no life. My torture is over.”
From the early Noughties, though, Vitali began making inroads into a new torture: politics, standing for mayor of Kyiv — twice without success — and in 2010 founding the party Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform. A vehement pro-European, when in November 2013 a planned agreement with the EU was abandoned days before it was due to be signed — with President Yanukovych reportedly bowing to pressure from Putin — Klitschko became a prominent leader of the Maidan protests, Ukraine’s largest demonstrations since the Orange Revolution almost a decade earlier. After Yanukovych fled, Vitali announced his candidacy for the presidency, but withdrew to support Petro Poroshenko, then gave up his parliamentary seat when finally elected mayor of Kyiv in May 2014.
The Klitschko brothers are an imposing combination of brawn and brains; both keen chess players, Vitali tells me that after 31 moves he forced a check in a game against the mighty Garry Kasparov. But, given his physicality and former career, I wonder whether he feels he has been underestimated, particularly when moving into politics. Not just in politics, he says. “In boxing, in the beginning, nobody took me seriously,” he cries, now extremely animated. “Tall, skinny guy without good co-ordination — everyone looked at me and said, ‘He never will achieve results.’ "
It’s true that commentators were cruel, noting that Vitali was not a “fluid athlete”, that he “moved like a piece of construction equipment” and was “robotic and ugly to watch”.
“My decision to go into politics, everyone said, ‘Boxer? Politics? No way,’ " he says. “It gives me huge motivation to prove that I’m good.” While it took three attempts for him to become mayor, he’s been re-elected twice, each time with a larger majority.
It has come at a cost, though. Having led separate lives for some years, in 2022, Vitali and Natalija divorced after 26 years of marriage. He seems sanguine about the sacrifice. “One rule in life: if you want to achieve the result, you have to give 100 per cent of your energy to make your dream true,” says Vitali. “You can’t have a dream and be working a little bit. You have to give everything you can to achieve your goal. In politics, especially in my home town, when you’re responsible for everything — education, transportation, medical care — it’s like a big country. No time for yourself, almost nothing.”
His three children — who are now in their late teens and early twenties — are a different matter though. “I feel guilty,” he says. “I was always at training camps, competitions.” He wishes he had spent, he says, “much more time with my children. But I tried to give to my children what I could.” Certainly, he’s given them height — his second son has stolen his father’s title of the tallest in the family, at 7ft 1in, and plays for the Ukrainian basketball team.
Does he ever get lonely? “Yes,” he says, then immediately tells me of his love of extreme sports — kitesurfing, mountain biking and in particular skydiving.
“I’m an adrenaline junkie,” he beams. “Without that, life has no reason.
“I am a hunter of emotions,” he declares. “And adrenaline gives me this portion of power, my energy, and it’s very important.”
Wladimir, meanwhile, broke up with Panettiere and in 2018 — following her reported eight-month stint in rehab — secured full custody of their daughter, now aged nine. He’s understandably reluctant to discuss it, but does show me a note she has written which reads: “My dad is mother father to me.”
One relationship that cannot be skirted over is that of Vitali’s with Volodymyr Zelensky. There’s reportedly little love lost between Ukraine’s president and the mayor of its capital city; Zelensky has publicly accused Vitali of failing to maintain Kyiv’s bomb shelters to the required level, while the mayor said late last year that Zelensky was showing authoritarian tendencies that could be dangerous for Ukraine.
Today, he says that Zelensky has “the most difficult job in the world. Everybody hopes Zelensky doesn’t make mistakes, because mistakes can be very painful for every one of us in the country. And honestly, I wish him to be successful, because from his success depends the success of the whole country, of all citizens.” For good measure, he adds, “Unity is a key for success, peace and freedom in our homeland.”
Vitali was, a decade ago, keen for the top job himself. Would he consider standing again in future? “Biggest mistake to make a dream about some position,” he demurs. “Right now, the question for everyone is how to survive, how to stop this war, to save the country and save democracy and make Ukraine a successful, democratic part of the European family.”
So, it’s not a “no”, then?
“Today, we have to be successful, and after that we can make the next dream or plans for the future,” he says. “Today it’s one dream for every Ukrainian: to bring peace back to Ukraine. Right now, it’s unity.”
Written by: Jane Mulkerrins
© The Times of London