‘I was praying: don’t let anybody kill me’ – Oleksandr Usyk on life in Ukrainian army

Oleksandr Usyk, the IBF, WBA and WBO world heavyweight champion, is one of the greatest fighters on the planet but he is not embarrassed to express the fear he felt this year as a soldier in the Ukrainian army. Soon after Vladimir Putin unleashed Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine on 24 February, Usyk and his friend Vasiliy Lomachenko, another of the best boxers in the world, joined the military. But as he patrolled the streets, carrying a machine gun rather than boxing gloves, dread gripped Usyk.

“Every day I was there,” he says, “I was praying and asking: ‘Please, God, don’t let anybody try to kill me. Please don’t let anybody shoot me. And please don’t make me shoot any other person.”

Usyk has been in London this week to promote his belated rematch on 20 August against Anthony Joshua, whom he beat so convincingly to become world champion last September, and he looks up after making that candid admission. “But if I had felt in danger, if I feel my life or my family is in jeopardy, I would have [killed a Russian soldier].”

Despite that very human reaction in a war zone, Usyk stresses: “I really didn’t want to leave our country. I didn’t want to leave our city. At one point I went to the hospital where soldiers were wounded and getting rehabilitation and they asked me to go, to fight [Joshua], to fight for the country. They said if you go there, you’re going to help our country even more instead of fighting inside Ukraine.”

Usyk left the war in late March to begin his training camp in Poland but footage on social media soon emerged which suggested that one of his former houses had been ransacked by invading Russian soldiers . “It was not my former house,” Usyk says calmly. “It’s my regular house in Vorzel. That house belongs