The former boxing champion turned mayor of Kyiv has become the hero of Ukraine – and second only to Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a target for Kremlin assassins.
On a vast table in the mayoral office, where the team marshalling the defence and morale of Kyiv gathers, sits a small jam jar of pennies. Vitali Klitschko lifts the jar in the same giant hand that once knocked out opponents in the ring, elevating him to world heavyweight boxing champion.
"It was collected by a small boy with a big heart," Klitschko, 51, explains of the collected pennies, which arrived in the Ukrainian capital along with a consignment of buses from the mayor of Riga in Latvia to help evacuate civilians from Kyiv's bombed-out suburbs. "He said, 'These are my lifelong savings. It's the money of my life, but I want to give this to the children of Kyiv to support them.' "
Klitschko and his brother, Wladimir, 46, rose to fame on the international boxing circuit years before the former entered politics and the latter became his constant companion and aide.
As celebrities they are mobbed by crowds wherever they go in the city, touring missile-blasted buildings and rallying the morale of their shellshocked fellow citizens. They radiate the very image of Ukrainian resistance and defiance from their privileged vantage point more than six and a half feet above the rubble-strewn ground.
But in private, Klitschko confesses, it is the stories of children that pierce his hard exterior, like that of the Latvian boy so moved by the plight of the city that he sent all his pocket money to help the children of Kyiv.
Days after the Russian invasion began in February, Klitschko visited Kyiv's main railway station, which was packed with people trying to flee the city, and found a small boy of five or six sitting in the corner, crying.
"The station was full, there were thousands and thousands of people and it was almost impossible to go in," he said. "There was a place inside the building where there were just children and I saw this little boy crying and asking about his mum and dad. I tried to cheer him up, give him a high five and say, 'Don't worry, your mum will be coming very soon. Let's play.' He didn't pay attention to me and he kept crying and crying." A woman approached the mayor and pulled him aside. "She told me, 'I found this boy. His parents were killed, but we haven't told him yet.' "
At the time, Klitschko's own life was in serious danger. The former heavyweight champion is far more than just a city mayor. One of the world's most recognisable Ukrainians, at least until Volodymyr Zelenskyy made his transition from comedy to politics, Klitschko has been leading the political punch-up to pull Ukraine from Russia's orbit for two decades, serving in parliament, seeking presidential office and helping lead the Euromaidan protests of 2013-2014 that kicked out the Kremlin-backed leader, Viktor Yanukovych.
On lists drawn up by the Kremlin, Klitschko was only second to Zelenskyy as a target for the assassination squads the Kremlin had planted in the Ukrainian capital ready to activate when the invasion began. Among them were hundreds of foreign mercenaries from the notorious Wagner Group, operated by one of Vladimir Putin's closest allies and flown in from assignments in Africa on the promise of lavish bonuses should they bring down their prey.
As Zelenskyy later revealed, their families were also on the list.
Klitschko's first move was to send his wife, mother and three children to safety outside Ukraine. "Family is a weak spot for me," he confesses, and the thought of worrying for their safety as he also led his city's resistance was overwhelming. "I had to think about the security of the city. I had to take care of so many things. So to get them to safety removed my point of weakness and made it much, much easier. I'm free to do my work."
He and his staff moved from their homes into the vast neoclassical administration building on Kyiv's main boulevard, Khreschatyk Street. The distinctive building could have been an easy target for Russian airstrikes. Klitschko, however, insisted he should not move directly into an underground bunker, settling on relocating his office from the ninth to the second floor to be closer to the bomb shelter when the air-raid sirens wailed. "We were sleeping there with our weapons," he said, having already publicly pledged to take up arms to defend the city. "Any second we were prepared to fight street to street."
Those first few days of the invasion were unbearably tense as the Russians grew closer and the bombing intensified. Television screens showed a 65km convoy of Russian armour bearing down on the city, guided by some of the mercenaries inside Kyiv. Within 48 hours of the invasion, Klitschko ordered a "hard" curfew to sweep the city for the mercenaries and other Russian "saboteurs", warning any civilians found outside that they would be treated as Kremlin agents and risked being "liquidated".
Offered the chance to evacuate by the Americans, Zelenskyy quipped that, "I need ammunition, not a ride." There is no record of Klitschko's response, other than a simple, "No." "It's our home. Why would we have to leave? We have to defend our home," Klitschko says. "I don't see the reason to leave the city, to leave the country." He shrugs off the observation that he could easily have been killed here, leaving the city without its leader.
"My father always told me it is a great privilege to give your life to defend your country," he says. "And we are actually fighting not for ourselves; we are defending our families and our future."
Fighting the Russian army is perhaps the last thing Klitschko grew up expecting to do. His own father was a major general in the Soviet air force and he and his brother grew up on a series of military bases from the central Asian steppes to East Germany, loyal subjects of the Soviet empire and staunch believers in the Communist cause.
Klitschko was born on a base in what was then the Soviet Republic of Kyrgyzstan, where his ideas about Moscow's enemies in the West were shaped by Soviet propaganda. "In front of our building there was a big billboard with a Nato soldier with a wolf's head, with arms, with blood, with weapons," he recalls. "And every morning when I stepped out of the building to go to school I was shocked when I looked in his eyes. It was terrible. And that's why we knew this is a Nato soldier and a monster."
Klitschko was 11 when the Soviet leader and his father's hero, Leonid Brezhnev, died. "My father was a Communist. He truly believed in our country. And I grew up thinking like my father, thinking like everyone, that the Americans wanted to destroy our country, the Americans wanted to make slaves of us, and that Brezhnev is our protector," he says. "When Brezhnev died, I was crying for weeks because now we didn't have our defender if the Americans come."
Klitschko remained a true believer until the beginning of his professional boxing career coincided with Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika reforms, opening up the Soviet Union from international isolation. "Perestroika came and I had a chance to fly to the United States," he recalls. He was 18 years old.
"I came back and told my father, 'I've been to Florida. I visited Disney World, so many places.' I told him, 'Sorry, everything you've heard about the United States is bullshit. It's a great country. They are great people.' "
Klitschko's father refused to believe him, arguing that the Americans must have borrowed an old trick from the Russian history books, erecting Potemkin cities – three-dimensional fakes – to fool the young boxer into believing the US was a superior culture. "He said, 'Please don't believe them. They build these cities with a nice atmosphere to use as propaganda. America is bad!' But after that I had a chance to bring my father to the United States."
Klitschko Sr was astounded when the scales fell from his eyes. "He said, 'I am sorry,' " Klitschko says. "Everyone was a victim of the Soviet system."
The same kind of propaganda campaign has been used by Russia against Ukraine, he says, ensuring mass support for the war by casting it as a battle of good against evil, a Russian campaign to save its brother nation from the grip of Nazis and fascists. RT, the international English language arm of the Russian state broadcaster, now banned in Britain, is in the forefront of the campaign.
"I see how war propaganda works now in Russia. They are talking about Ukraine as nationalists, radicals, fascists, and Russians truly believe in that," he says. "I was talking to my friends, educated and from intelligent families, and they truly believe that. It's worked too well, much better than in Soviet times. Seventy per cent of the Russian population support the war against Ukraine. They are just brainwashing people. It's the main weapon. Much more important than tanks, planes or rockets. The media."
Putin's invasion has many Ukrainians reflecting on the long span of history during which their country has suffered at Moscow's hands. Klitschko's own family history maps that of his country: several of his ancestors died in the Holodomor, the famine engineered by Stalin that killed up to seven million people in 1932-33, mostly Ukrainians, while several Jewish antecedents were victims of the Holocaust, which arrived in Ukraine after the Red Army retreated and the Germans invaded, blowing up the majestic boulevard where Klitschko's office now stands. In the jumbled shelves behind his desk, a menorah with three missing candles bumps up against an Orthodox icon and a small replica of the multicoloured statue of a giraffe that stands at the entrance to Kyiv Zoo.
Klitschko is clear in pinning Ukraine's current suffering on Vladimir Putin rather than some unavoidable imperial impulse in the Russian character or culture. Klitschko himself is half Russian through his mother, who, like a significant minority in Ukraine, hardly speaks the Ukrainian tongue. "How can I hate Russians?" he asks. "I can't hate my mum. In my body, half of my blood is Russian. We have millions of examples exactly the same. Some people of Russian nationality are defending Ukraine because Ukraine is their homeland and they love it so much."
Russia and Ukraine were always said to be brother countries (early in his boxing career, Klitschko promised his mother he would never take on his younger sibling in the ring). That the brother countries are now at war "is not a question of nationality. It is a question of mentality, vision and values."
Klitschko signalled his decisive break with "Russian values" when he entered politics following the 2004 Orange Revolution that briefly shut out the pro-Russian presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych from power. After the 2014 Euromaidan protests in Independence Square, only a few hundred metres from where we're sitting, when Yanukovych fled to Russia, Petro Poroshenko was elected president with the firm backing of Klitschko, by then mayor of Kyiv.
The events of 2014 unleashed Moscow's armed efforts to prevent Ukraine from breaking free of its orbit, beginning with the annexation of Crimea and a Kremlin-backed separatist war in the Donbas, leading inexorably, Klitschko believes, to the full invasion that began in February. As much as 2014 put Ukraine on the path towards joining the European family, this war, according to Klitschko, will shape Ukraine's determination to fight for that future.
The spirit Ukrainians have shown in the face of the invasion still moves him. "That first week of the war, the Russians were already at the [southern flank] of Kyiv. It was night, snowing, cold, windy, three o'clock in the morning, dark. I checked the city and in some street on the left side of the city where the civil defence was, I saw a line almost miles long." When he went to investigate, he found men and women queuing all night for weapons to join the territorial defence force and get a weapon. "They stayed day and night to pick up the weapons," he says. "They didn't want to leave. They stayed in Kyiv and they are ready to fight and defend the city."
Another time he went to the north of the capital to see the destruction caused by Russian shelling as they tried to blast their way in. A man in his sixties stepped forward to show the mayor the vast hole left in his shattered apartment block and asked what he should do. "I gave him proposals to evacuate him to a safe place, maybe in the west of the country, maybe outside the country," Klitschko remembers. "He said, 'No, no, you don't understand me. I don't want to leave. All my life is spent here. My friends, my relatives live here. Mr Mayor, can you do me a favour? I need weapons.' "
Those are uplifting stories of resistance, but the tragic ones haunt Klitschko too. "Every day I have a sad story," he laments. "One day I will be ready to write the storybooks about the simple people around me. Emotional stories." Despite the invaders being repelled from the capital at the end of March, Klitschko refuses to believe Russia's claim that its only objective now is to take Ukraine's eastern Donbas region.
"If we listen to Russian propaganda, they told us about their goals," he says. "But to be honest, the Donbas is not the goal of Russians; Crimea is not the goal. The target was and still is the capital of Ukraine."
While life in Kyiv may appear to be returning to normal, with cafés, shops and bars open, Klitschko is not letting its guard down. American-supplied air defences have given city authorities a greater sense of security and Klitschko's team have returned to their ninth-floor offices even if the front of the building is still sandbagged, with camouflage nets adorning the defences around the entrance. Klitschko has not seen his family since the invasion began in February and has left the city only twice – once to go to Davos, an annual event for him, and second to attend the Nato summit in Madrid. "I was not there just as a representative of the capital of Ukraine; I was a representative of the country," he says. "And Kyiv is the heart of the country."
The invasion has put paid, for now, to another brotherly feud, that between Zelenskyy and Klitschko, who was targeted in the president's anti-corruption drive focused on Poroshenko and his associates. Klitschko has angrily rejected prior attempts to investigate him over allegedly corrupt land deals, accusing Zelenskyy of political persecution. Poroshenko's trial for treason was only put off due to the Russian invasion. Back when he still harboured presidential ambitions, Klitschko found himself snarled in controversy over the years he lived as a boxing professional in Germany, with political opponents trying to exclude him over historic residency requirements. He ultimately threw his support behind Poroshenko.
Does he still have his eyes on the top job, even if his current one is hardly small? "Many people think to be president is a privilege," he replies. "It's not. It's a big, big, big responsibility. No private life any more. You have to spend your life for your people." It is only when I observe that he has not said, "No," that he notices how hot the room has become. "Did you switch off the air conditioner?" he says accusingly as an aide scrabbles with the remote control. I note again that, like Zelenskyy, he was a celebrity before politics and might fit the desired Ukrainian model. "Listen, Zelenskyy is already very nervous, so if you write about the ambition of someone else to be president…" he says. "Please don't make our president nervous."
Written by: Catherine Philp
© The Times of London
