Dayana Yastremska, a Ukrainian tennis player ranked 113th in the world, said her family's apartment in Odessa was destroyed by a Russian missile strike on Saturday. She shared images of the wrecked building on Instagram along with a message expressing her anger.
Yastremska said a Kalibr cruise missile had hit their building directly. She said the only thing that survived was a Roland Garros towel, calling it symbolic: a piece of world tennis had survived a Russian missile, but their home had not.
The images she posted show a residential building with its upper floors torn open, and a towel from the 2025 edition of the French Open sitting seemingly untouched at the edge of the rubble.
Yastremska went on to address the WTA and the ITF, the governing bodies of women's professional tennis, asking them to look at the images through Ukrainian eyes. She said this is what their neutrality really means, seen from the Ukrainian side of the court.
A war that keeps reaching Ukraine's tennis players
Yastremska is not the first Ukrainian player to describe a Russian strike landing close to home during a Grand Slam. At the last French Open, her compatriot Marta Kostyuk said she learned on the morning of her first match that a Russian bomb had fallen barely 100 metres from her parents' house in Kyiv.
Kostyuk went on to reach the final of that tournament, a run that put a spotlight on the strained relations between Russian and Ukrainian players on the professional tour, relations many have described as impossible to normalise while the war continues.
Odessa, where Yastremska's family lived, is a major Ukrainian port city on the Black Sea that has been repeatedly targeted by Russian strikes since Moscow's full-scale invasion began in February 2022.
Yastremska's career
Yastremska, now ranked 113th in the world, reached a career-high ranking of 21st. She competed at the 2026 French Open in Paris in May, the tournament from which the surviving towel came.
Her Instagram post did not say whether anyone was hurt in the strike on the building, and she gave no further details on her family's current situation.
