A hard goodbye: Maksym Galinichev died; the Ukrainian athlete who quit boxing to defend his country.

A senseless loss. A promise that set aside his passion to defend his loved ones. He was only 22 years old.

According to several reports, Maksym was serving in Ukraine’s Sycheslav Airborne Brigade in the Luhansk region, where he died on March 10. He joined the war in May 2022, three months after Russia’s declaration of war.

It was also then that he refused to participate in the men’s European Championship of the European Boxing Confederation, having already made the decision to go to war.

Galinichev won the silver medal in the -56kg category at the Buenos Aires 2018 Youth Olympic Games and the gold medal in the EUBC Youth European Championship that same year.

The one who spoke out on this news was Vladyslav Heraskevych, the first Ukrainian to compete in Skeleton. The 24-year-old, who participated in the last two Winter Olympic Games, is very actively sharing his stance on the war on his social media. Vladyslav became known at the Beijing 2022 Games for displaying a sign with the legend “No War”.

Unfortunately, Galinichev joins a long list of different Ukrainian athletes who lost their lives during the war. Vadym Huttsait, Ukrainian sports minister and former Olympic champion, confirmed last February that the number of people related to sports killed while serving their country exceeds 200 and that in addition, more than 340 sports facilities were damaged or in ruins.

Among all of them, Olympic athletes such as the biathlete Yevhen Malyshev, who died in March 2022, the skater Dmytro Sharpar, 25, and Volodymyr Androschuk, a 20-year-old athlete, a specialist in decathlon, stand out. The last two lost their lives fighting near Bakhmut.

On the other hand, the Ukrainian Boxing Federation (FBU) refused to send athletes to the Women’s World Championship of the International Boxing Association (IBA) due to the presence of Russian and Belarusian boxers. This was confirmed by Oleg Ilchenko, vice-president of the FBU, in an interview with the news site Suspilne Sport.

The measure comes after the decision taken by the IBA, led by Russian official Umar Kremlev, to lift the ban on boxers from Russia and Belarus from competing under their own flag.

As if that were not enough, the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine threatened to boycott Paris 2024 if athletes from Russia and Belarus are allowed to compete.