Vitali Klitschko

Origins and early life

Vitali Klitschko was born on 19 July 1971 at Belovodsk, in the Soviet Union, the son of a Soviet air force officer, and the site records him through his paternal grandmother: in an interview with the Jerusalem Post on 11 March 2022 he said that he is proud to have Jewish blood, and Ukrainian genealogical research by the historian Boris Kremenetsky, relayed by Ukrainian media, identifies that grandmother as Tamara Yukhimivna Etinzon, born at Smila in the Cherkasy region, a schoolteacher, hidden by her husband Rodion Klitschko during the German occupation of the town; her brother Anatoli Etinzon was killed at the front in 1943.

This fiche notes that the Jerusalem Post itself presents the detailed filiation as the work of that researcher rather than as an archival certainty. Klitschko took up kickboxing and then boxing, won the WBO heavyweight title in 1999 and the WBC title in 2004, and held it until his retirement in 2013 with a record of forty-five wins in forty-seven fights, forty-one by knockout; he holds a doctorate in sports science, which earned him the nickname Doctor Ironfist.

Work and career

He entered Ukrainian politics, led a party into parliament, was a figure of the Maidan protests of 2013 and 2014, and was elected mayor of Kyiv in June 2014. He has remained in the city throughout the Russian invasion since February 2022, and his brother Wladimir, also a former world champion, joined the territorial defence.