Her father made it out of Ukraine, but her brothers didn’t. The Ukrainian Olympic champion from 2018 Alyona Savchenko is very worried about her family: “My brothers are not allowed to go out and they don’t want to either. They say we are defending our country,” said the figure skater on Saturday evening in the ZDF “Sportstudio”.
“It hits me hard, it weighs heavily on me. I worry about the people who can’t help it. It’s terrible.” She hasn’t heard from aunts and uncles who live in Donetsk in the east of the country for a long time. “For two weeks we have had no information. We don’t know if they are alive or not,” said Savchenko (38). At least she can still reach her brothers by phone: “My brothers only answer the phone if it’s not too dangerous.”
Her father is now in Germany. Savchenko wants to meet him in the coming week. “Through friends and acquaintances I managed that he came to Germany yesterday,” she said. But the journey was anything but easy: “It took him four days. The whole ride was like something out of a horror movie.” There were “non-stop shootings”.
