‘They play, we suffer’: Olympian who led Beijing protest calls for total Russian ban

Days before Vladyslav Heraskevych’s country was plunged into an enduring nightmare the skeleton athlete provided one of the defining images of the Winter Olympics. Facing the TV cameras he held up a simple sign – “No war in Ukraine” – even though he feared it would get him kicked out of Beijing. It was an act of defiance which made headlines around the globe. But then his world, like that of millions of other Ukrainians, was violently torn from him.

Four months later Heraskevych is back with a new message. This time it is delivered from the bombed out Chernihiv Olympic Training and Sports Centre, 31 miles from the border of Belarus, after he has spent the day pushing young kids scarred by war on sleds. “It is time for all sports to ban Russian athletes until the war is over,” Heraskevych says. “It is absolutely crazy that they play while we suffer.”

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He had just watched kids push sleds around the Yuri Gagarin Stadium track, pretending to be Olympians, to a backdrop of a destroyed main stand and an enormous crater in the pitch. Before the war Desna Chernihiv, who were seventh in the Ukrainian Premier League, played here. Meanwhile thousands of amateurs trained in the massive sporting complex. Now, Heraskevych says, a population of 300,000 has very little.

“The idea of coming to Chernihiv is to use sports to bring happiness to kids whose childhood has been stolen by occupiers,” he says. “For over a month these kids heard rockets and explosions all around them. They had nightmares. They had to stay in basements to stay safe. But they are still kids and they need to have fun. And we also want to show that sport can help people’s