Marta Kostyuk Is Becoming a Star. Her City Is Under Attack.

On May 24, the day of Marta Kostyuk’s first-round match at the French Open, a Russian missile destroyed a building about 300 feet from her family’s home in Kyiv. Three hours later, she walked onto the clay at Roland-Garros and won in straight sets. At the press conference afterward, she said, “I felt sick. If it was 100 meters closer, I probably wouldn’t have a mom and a sister today.” Russia claimed it had been targeting military command centers, but what it actually hit, with 600 drones and 90 missiles, was a Kyiv water-supply facility, the National Chernobyl Museum, the Ukraine Foreign Ministry building, a market, several schools, and dozens of residential buildings.

At the beginning of this season, Kostyuk was No. 26 in the world. She arrived at Flushing Meadows last week for the U.S. Open with a career-high ranking of No. 11, having barreled her way toward the WTA top 10 during a particularly remarkable 17-match winning streak on clay earlier this spring, featuring two titles and two back-to-back runs to the semifinals of Roland-Garros and Wimbledon. In New York, she’s cruised through three consecutive matches without dropping a set; on Sunday in Louis Armstrong Stadium, the Czech Linda Nosková awaits her in the round of 16.

Kostyuk’s ascent has come as Russia’s bombing campaign against Ukraine, and particularly Kyiv, intensifies amid the country’s dire shortage of air-defense weaponry. Kostyuk now occupies a kind of perverse dual reality. She is an emblem of national pride and perseverance, an aggressive player with balletic movement and a pair of cornflower blue eyes. She is a magnet for high-end designers and parasocial admiration. In the midst of her breakout season, as she continues to amass fame and fortune and victories with glamorous Instagram posts and lucrative sponsorship deals and custom-fit Wilson dresses, not a single moment of it changes Kostyuk’s other existence in Kyiv, which mostly plays out in her mind. It’s the city where she was born and raised, the city another country has spent more than four years assaulting, burning down hospitals and blowing up energy grids with little regard for civilian life. Kostyuk thinks about this nearly every moment she’s awake. At the same time, she must contend with the pressure-cooker grind that is professional tennis at the highest level.

“I’m in the constant mode of processing a lot of things,” she told me over the phone this week. “Fears, my emotions — sometimes related to tennis, sometimes related to Ukraine, my family, whatever it is.”

Kostyuk first picked up a racket when she was four; her mother, former professional player Talina Beiko, recognized that she had a prodigy on her hands and became her daughter’s first coach. (Kostyuk now works with Polish former player Sandra Zaniewska.) She turned pro in 2016, when she was just 14, and moved to Monte Carlo in 2020. “I was lucky enough to stay in Ukraine as long as I did, because a lot of players left when they were much younger,” Kostyuk said. “I could create a lot of memories there and just feel like a Ukrainian in my soul. A lot of the tennis courts from my childhood — they’re the same courts I come back to when I’m practicing in Kyiv to this day. I try not to go back so far in time [in my mind] because it was so different and… I don’t know,” she trails off. “It’s emotional.”
Except for one of her sisters who relocated to Germany, the entirety of Kostyuk’s family are still in Ukraine. “Every day is different,” she said. “Some days I can just put it all aside, but not always. I really struggled with the earlier months of the war, but now I feel like it’s something that unfortunately I’m used to, as sad as it sounds.”

Kostyuk stretches to play a forehand against Elina Svitolina of Ukraine during their Women’s Singles quarter-final match on Day Ten of the 2026 French Open.
Photo: Matthew Stockman/Getty Images

Kostyuk’s banner season kicked off in earnest with a title at the Open Capfinances Métropole in Rouen, France, in April. She turned around and won again in Madrid the next month, picking up her first Masters 1000 tournament victory with a win against Russian teenager Mirra Andreeva in the final. Kostyuk did a backflip on court to celebrate. (As a child, she reached fourth in acrobatics in the Ukrainian national championships and was a member of the national Ukrainian gymnastics team.) In her victory speech, Kostyuk thanked all of her competitors from the tournament collectively for a very special two weeks, but did not single out Andreeva by name, as is customary after a championship match. The Ukrainian players on tour generally no longer shake hands with or individually acknowledge their Russian and Belarusian opponents, who compete under neutral flags since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Kostyuk worked her way through the French Open dropping only one set on her way to the quarterfinals, where she faced her compatriot Elina Svitolina. Twenty-two Ukrainians had died during the night, after Russia launched a drone attack. More than 130 people were wounded. Kostyuk and Svitolina spent three hours on court that day locked in a rhythmic back and forth, with the pair splitting sets until Kostyuk emerged victorious. Afterwards, they both rushed to the net, and hugged each other. Kostyuk dedicated her win to their homeland. “We had a very difficult night again in Ukraine, especially in Kyiv, so many people dead,” she said on court, in tears. “I want to give this match to the Ukrainian people and their resilience. Slava Ukraini.” Kostyuk herself made history that day, becoming the first Ukrainian woman in the Open Era to reach a Roland Garros semifinal.

Kostyuk and Svitolina leave the court after embracing following Kostyuk’s victory.
Photo: Julien De Rosa/AFP via Getty Images

In the semifinals, Kostyuk faced Andreeva again. Ahead of their match, she gave a pointed speech to the press, noting that the Russian and Belarusian competitors on tour were “all grown ups” and that she felt that anyone keeping silent on the war had made a deliberate choice. “They know what’s going on,” she said. “They have phones, they have Instagram, they have news. I don’t know how you can sleep at night peacefully, when this is going on, and you have nothing to say about it.” It was cloudy and windy the day of the semifinals in Paris, and Andreeva broke early. Kostyuk’s game, by comparison, was riddled with unforced errors, and she scraped only a single game onto the board in the first set. When Andreeva won the match, in straight sets, she shook the umpire’s hand and pumped her arms to the crowd. She wiped the sweat from her face and hugged her coach. By then, Kostyuk had blown a kiss to the stands and disappeared from view. Weeks later, she managed a run to the Wimbledon semifinals during some of the worst attacks against Kyiv of the entire war, including an 11-hour assault that became known as the “Night of Horror.” “It’s not easy to disconnect entirely,” she said at the time. She fell to the eventual champion, Nosková, in straight sets.

On the evening of August 28, less than 48 hours before Kostyuk’s first-round match at the U.S. Open, Russia struck a weapons depot just outside of Kyiv that killed at least 38 civilians, most of whom were elderly residents of a nearby nursing home. Kostyuk prevailed in Queens, defeating Australia’s Storm Hunter in just over an hour. She won her next match three days later, too, against the American (and 2017 tournament champion) Sloane Stephens. One of Kostyuk’s dogs was seated in her husband’s lap, panting. Toward the end of the match, Zaniewska leaned over and mimed a gentle mock pant in response, grinning into the pup’s face. Afterward, on court, Kostyuk thanked the crowd for their compassion and support. She thanked God, and her team, for keeping her grounded, and said that it had been very hard, that her country had been under attack for the past six days and she was doing her best to keep her head held high.

Later in the day, Kostyuk posted a number of photos to her Instagram stories: candids of herself (along with one selfie with Stephens), muscled, mid-action, swinging away in the September humidity. She shared a reel, too, of a Ukrainian woman, filmed as she walked through the rubble of a destroyed living room, pointing to the gaping holes where the walls and ceilings used to be. Somehow, a piano, undamaged, is in the middle of the scene. At one point, the woman sits down at the bench, and begins to play. I asked Kostyuk if she knew who the woman was. “No,” she said. “I have a lot of videos like this in my feed. Sometimes, some of them are just so incredible to me that I feel like I cannot not share them with everyone.”