INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — Marta Kostyuk, the top-ranked Ukrainian tennis player in the world, drew home-crowd favorite Robin Montgomery for her first match at the BNP Paribas Open Friday.
Listening to the crowd at Stadium 4, the match could have been in Kyiv, not California: they were there for Kostyuk, the world No. 24, from the first ball to the last as she beat Montgomery 6-1, 6-3.
That was no small thing for a Ukrainian player enduring one of the more tumultuous weeks in her country’s war against Russia, since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in early 2022.
Last Friday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine endured a withering attack from U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice-President J.D. Vance in the Oval Office. With television cameras rolling, they criticized Zelensky for not being sufficiently “thankful” for American aid and ridiculed him for trying to use leverage that they said he did not possess.
“You don’t have the cards. You’re either going to make a deal, or we’re out,” Trump told Zelensky.
He then announced a pause in U.S. military aid to Ukraine.
Sudden cutbacks at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) had already affected the flow of humanitarian aid, after Trump directed Elon Musk, an unelected “special government employee”, and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is named for an internet meme featuring a dog, to shut that agency down.
After that White House confrontation, Kostyuk said her phone was flooded by American friends and acquaintances — some in tennis, many outside it — expressing empathy.
“A lot of messages and a lot of apologies, which is amazing,” she said in her news conference after beating Montgomery. “It’s incredible to see this, that people still support us.”
Three years into the war back home, Ukraine’s tennis players have felt just about every emotion they could possibly feel.
The concern is never far from them. In the late afternoon Friday at Indian Wells, after she had upset three-time Grand Slam finalist Ons Jabeur 6-3, 6-1, Dayana Yastremska opened her phone to demonstrate how she keeps up with developments.
She thumbed through a series of apps including the messaging service Telegram, which keeps her up to date on the latest missile attacks, and the alarms that warn the citizens of her home city, Odesa, to head for the bomb shelters. Her sister, father and grandparents still live there, so Yastremska checks the alerts as soon as she wakes each day before she calls home. She repeats the process once her matches are over.
The news has been especially bad the past week, as the growing split between the Trump administration and Zelensky has emboldened Russia’s forces.
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“After what happened on this day, the attack on Ukraine got higher than it was before, and on my city it is the same,” she says. “It’s very intense. So many days, we don’t have light and water.”
Yastremska was in Ukraine just a few weeks ago. She travelled there following the WTA tournament in Linz, Austria, to celebrate her younger sister Ivanna’s 18th birthday. Ivanna used to be a professional tennis player too but is now at university studying journalism while also pursuing a singing career.
Dayana had to fly from Austria to Chișinău, capital of Moldova, before driving about five hours across the border to reach Odesa. If Odesa were easier to get to, she would move home in a heartbeat, she says, war or no war.
“I love my city,” she stresses.
Last Friday was an especially trying one for Yastremska, who landed in San Francisco from Europe to the news of the disastrous Trump/Zelensky meeting. Then, immigration officials told her that someone had reported her passport to Interpol as stolen. That invalidated her 10-year visa to enter the U.S., and she was nearly sent back to Europe during four hours of wrangling to sort through the issue.
Ultimately, she received a six-month visa to tide her over; she will need to extend that if she wants to return to the States to play the U.S. Open in August.
“Crazy, crazy day. I thought I would explode,” she says.
She didn’t, of course. And a week later she was beating a three-time major finalist in straight sets, to set up a match Sunday against five-time Grand Slam champion Iga Swiatek, who has won two out of the past three BNP Paribas Opens.
Yastremska in focus mode at the Australian Open in January. (Ng Han Guan / Associated Press)
She, Kostyuk and Elina Svitolina, who also won here Friday, have had three years of learning to cope with these kinds of hazards.
“We are Ukrainians, we have this kind of character that we are able to get through difficult situations,” Yastremska says. Or at the very least manage them, and even sometimes find a silver lining.
Kostyuk was heartbroken when that meeting of the presidents went so poorly. But she has since come to embrace the idea that so many people in the U.S. wanted to help early on after Russia’s attack, and still do. “It’s important to remember that that was not one person deciding to help Ukraine and to be an ally of Ukraine, but a lot of people,” she said. “And I’m very thankful for all these people.”
There’s a saying Kostyuk keeps coming back to, on and off the court. “Everything will be fine, and if it’s not fine, it means it’s not the end,” she said.
She also does not forget that everyone in tennis has their own problems and has to figure out how to leave those on the side of the court and approach their jobs professionally. Chances are, she said, your opponent is spending very little time worrying about your mental state, or the traumas of your life.
“Everyone is going through something in their lives,” she says. “Whether it’s war or some of their relatives are not feeling well or dying or some problems in the family. It’s very important to kind of put everything that’s outside of the court aside and just go out there and do the job that you are doing.”
With that, Kostyuk was off to prepare for another day at the office — Sunday’s round-of-32 date with another American opponent, Caroline Dolehide.
There’s a good chance she will get plenty of support in that one, too.
(Top photo of Marta Kostyuk: Robert Prange / Getty Images)