The text below is taken from The National website.
Ukrainian Elina Svitolina is continuing her “mission” to use her platform as an international tennis star to highlight issues affecting her war-stricken home country.
Svitolina, who is currently ranked 23rd in the WTA world rankings but has been as high as No 3, has been an outspoken critic of Russia's invasion of Ukraine that began in 2022 and has led to hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides and large swathes of eastern Ukraine annexed by Russia.
The 30-year-old is a global ambassador for 'Bring Kids Back UA', an initiative led by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to secure the safe return of Ukrainian children who were forcefully deported to Russia during the early stages of the conflict.
“I feel like I have a mission, I have a platform that I use to work,” Svitolina told The National.
“To bring attention, to bring people together, to unite, for the causes and for our future because hopefully the war will end soon and then we'll have a lot of work to rebuild our country and to build our future. This initiative is working really hard to bring back kids that have been stolen from Ukraine. There's still more than 20,000 kids that are missing. They are our future.”
Bring Kids Back’s main objective is "identifying, locating, and safely repatriating all illegally deported children to reunite them with their families and guardians in a secure environment".
Svitolina has heard first hand the stories of children who have successfully returned home including one girl, born in Kherson in 2008, who was forcibly taken out of Ukraine and moved to a Russian camp.
“She was told that Russia is the only country she should care about, and that Ukraine is not even a nation,” she said. “These kinds of stories are really, really tough to hear.”