For Marta Kostyuk, her first WTA 1000 final will go beyond the tennis court

MADRID — Marta Kostyuk is having herself a month.

Two weeks ago, she won her first title in three years, at the WTA 250 Rouen Open in France. On Saturday, she will play for the biggest one of her career, when she meets Mirra Andreeva in the Madrid Open final. It is Kostyuk’s first WTA 1000 title tilt, a year on from a tempestuous quarterfinal in the Spanish capital against world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka.

Kostyuk lost that match 7-6(4), 7-6(7), but it turned with Sabalenka serving down 5-4 in the second-set tiebreak. She missed a first serve, with rain falling. She then approached chair umpire Jenny Zhang, who told her to continue. Sabalenka threw the ball up, caught it, and went to sit on her bench. Zhang explained to Kostyuk that Sabalenka would then get a first serve when the match resumed, but Sabalenka had been the one who stopped it, not the umpire. Kostyuk was furious. The rain stopped. Sabalenka won.

There was no handshake at the end of that match, and not because of the serve acrimony. Kostyuk, and the other players from Ukraine on the WTA Tour, do not shake hands with players from Russia and Belarus. They have not done so since Russia, with assistance from Belarus, invaded Ukraine in 2022.

The same will be true of Kostyuk’s final against Andreeva, and it was true of the player Kostyuk beat to get there: Anastasia Potapova, who switched nationality to Austria last year. Russian and Belarusian players are not currently allowed to play under their own flags.

Kostyuk named one exception to her policy, but she said that Potapova’s switch in nationality, and others like it, did not change her sentiments.

“The only person that I shake hands with is Daria Kasatkina, because she didn’t just change her passport, she also openly said that she doesn’t support the war,” she said in a news conference ahead of her 6-2, 1-6, 6-1 win over Potapova, who reached the semifinals after entering as a lucky loser, thanks to Madison Keys’ withdrawal due to illness.

“So this is why me and other girls made the decision to shake hands with her, purely out of respect.

“There have been multiple players who have changed their nationality, but none of them ever voiced anything against war or, you know, anything to support Ukrainians. So, for me, that doesn’t change.”

When asked about her change of nationality during a news conference at January’s Australian Open, Potapova said that it had been in the works for some time, that she has been living in Vienna, Austria for a while, and considers it her “second home.”

“Now it’s my first home,” she said. She did not say whether her switch had anything to do with Russia’s politics.

Kasatkina, who started representing Australia in 2025, described the war as a “full-blown nightmare” in a series of interviews with Russian blogger Vitya Kravchenko, in which she also came out publicly. At the 2025 Charleston Open, she told reporters that defecting from Russia was necessary if she wanted to be herself.

Like several other players from Ukraine, Kostyuk’s family is still there, including her mother, who moved back two years ago after staying with Kostyuk in France for a time.

Kostyuk, 23, spent the first year of the war trying to win on behalf of her country and to bring inspiration to her fellow citizens. Eventually, that burden became too heavy, and she has tried to separate tennis from the war, but only so much. When she won the title in Rouen over another player from Ukraine, Veronika Podrez, she gave an emotional speech about the challenges that players from her country faced in recent years.

She will face a huge challenge in Andreeva, the 19-year-old star who lives in France. Kostyuk’s past finals against native Russians and Belarusians at the top of the WTA Tour rankings have not gone well. She lost to Elena Rybakina at the Stuttgart Tennis Grand Prix in 2024, and to Sabalenka at the Brisbane International in January.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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