Ukrainian boxer sacrifices Olympic dreams and life to fight against Russia’s invasion

ROMNEY, Ukraine (AP) — Maxim Halynichev won a silver medal at the Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires in a match that was described at the time as “two of the best young fighters going for glory.” He considered the meet a loss – it was not gold, after all – but it gave him a map for the future.

So Halynichev made a plan: he would beat that boxer next time. He will teach his daughter the basics of his game so that she can defend herself. And he would win a medal for Ukraine at the Paris Olympics.

Halinchev outlined those ambitions as an athlete in an interview for the Ukraine Boxing Federation website in December 2021, as Russian troops were already massing on Ukraine’s borders.

When asked if he was afraid before the fight, he described his thinking.

“Fear can affect people in different ways. Some people become handicapped by this. Some people react more freely,” he said then. “If you can control yourself and your body and if you can set yourself up in the right way, the fear will go away.”

He won’t be able to prove that philosophy in the Olympic rings in Paris.

Halynichev signed up as a soldier and was killed at the front in March 2023 at the age of 22, one of more than 400 athletes killed since the war began. His body has not been recovered yet.

As one of Ukraine’s most promising boxing prospects, Helinichev may have been spared the fight. Ukraine has sent many of its Olympic hopefuls to train abroad ahead of the Summer Games. But not everyone wants to escape. Some people choose to defend their country’s honor on the battlefield rather than on the playing field.

Halinichev’s attitude toward fear remained intact after a full-scale Russian invasion, but his priorities changed.

It happened during a drive from his home region of Sumy to Kiev in April 2022, where he planned to train for the next European Championships. Their coach Bohdan Dmitrenko said Russia had just withdrawn from the area and all along the highway he had seen towns and villages destroyed by Russian troops during their brief occupation.

“I have a small child. I don’t want him to be captured among the invaders, among the Russians,” Halynichev told another of his coaches, Volodymyr Vinnikov.

“I said, Maxim, please listen to me, you are still a representative of Ukrainian boxing, you also defend the honor of Ukraine. The flag, the anthem – this is also very important,” Vinnikov told.

“You will not convince me. I have taken this decision. I will learn to shoot,” Halynichev told him.

Boxing was still important to him, but he wanted more, said his life partner Polina Ihrak. Despite the Russian withdrawal, the border region of Sumy was still under attack. Kherson, where he trained, was under Russian occupation and there were repeated reports of the suffering of the Ukrainian people there.

“He couldn’t understand how his friends, coaches who were in Kherson, left him without the ability to live, let alone train, and he would go somewhere in Europe,” Ihraq said. “He couldn’t let himself do it. It meant something to him.”

According to the Boxing Federation of Ukraine, in May 2022, at the age of 21, Halynichev joined the airborne assault troops. Before the year was out he was wounded near Bakhmut, his leg wounded and the shrapnel penetrating so deeply into his leg that doctors could not remove them.

During his recovery, Helinichev spent time with his coach but avoided discussing what he saw in the battle. Everyone expected him to leave the army, but Halynichev returned to the battlefield without his wounds healing.

“He believed he had to return to his brothers with weapons because they were needed,” said Ihrak, the mother of his daughter Vasilisa.

Halynichev and Ihrak last spoke over video call on March 9, 2023. Days without contact became weeks. He tried to call Halynichev and his commander. Neither replied.

She began scrolling through Russian Telegram channels, searching for his face amid battlefield photos of the dead and injured. A picture surfaced of a dead body in the forest.

“His mother recognized him immediately, but I didn’t because I think I refused to accept it,” Ihraq said. He was assassinated on March 10, 2023, in Luhansk, an area now almost entirely under Russian control.

At a recent memorial service for her father at the gym where he trained, 4-year-old Vasilisa bounced happily around the boxing ring wearing oversized gloves that dwarfed her tiny hands.

It would not be his father who would teach him to fight, but Ihrak could not have imagined that Halynichev would do anything different.

“People go there (to the front) not to regret but to make a change,” Ihraq said. “He went back without any doubt.”

Others who died fighting for Ukraine included: pistol shooter Ivan Bidnyk, who won a silver medal at the European Championships, and Ukraine national team member Yehor Kihitov; Stanislav Hlyulenkov, a 22-year-old judoka whose body was identified 10 months after he was killed; and weightlifter Oleksandr Pylyshenko, who represented Ukraine at the Rio Olympics in 2016. A Russian missile attack on Dnipro kills acrobatics coach Anastasia Ihanatenko, her husband and their 18-month-old son.

Vinnikov, who coached Helinichev in 2017, has no doubt that the young man would have represented his country at the Paris Games, starting on July 26, had the attack not derailed his plans. “He could have won a medal for his country,” the coach insisted.

She had immense potential: gold medal at the 2017 European Youth Championships, silver medal at the 2018 Youth Olympic Games, silver medal at the 2021 European Under-22 Championships.

In his empty apartment in the town of Shostka, his parents have filled a room with evidence of what he has already achieved: trophies and medals from 2010 to 2021, arranged neatly on a shelf went.

Her photo stands in the corner with a candle, her childhood photos, a religious symbol, and flowers. His boxing gloves are kept nearby.

But Halynichev’s parents no longer live there. Since the war, he has rebuilt his life in the Czech Republic. Ihrak is considering moving to Germany.

Dmitrenko, his coach, keeps his photographs of Helinichev neatly organized in folders and he still has an archive of their messages sent to each other. He remembered a moment just before the war when he was praising Halynichev’s achievements.

Halynichev replied simply: “Everything is still ahead.”

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Leicester reported from Paris.