One orange towel. That is all that was left recognisable in the smoking rubble of Dayana Yastremska's family apartment in Odesa after a Russian Kalibr cruise missile tore through the building on Friday night. The 26-year-old Ukrainian tennis player posted images on social media showing a multi-storey residential block in flames — and, hanging from the wreckage, a signature clay-court towel from Roland Garros, the Paris Grand Slam. "A piece of world tennis survived a Russian missile," she wrote on Instagram.

"Our home did not." The attack was not limited to a single building. Oleh Kiper, the regional head of Odesa, confirmed that a coordinated missile and drone strike hit both Odesa and the nearby port city of Chornomorsk on the same night, leaving 37 people injured — among them a baby — and two others still unaccounted for. Yastremska directed her words beyond the wreckage, tagging the Women's Tennis Association and the International Tennis Federation directly.

"Look at these images through our eyes," she urged the governing bodies of her sport. Yastremska is ranked 113th in the world and reached the Australian Open semifinals as recently as 2024, cementing her status as one of Ukraine's most prominent athletes. Her visibility gives her words a reach that goes far beyond domestic sport — and she is using it deliberately, framing the destruction as a message about what she calls "the Russian world." She is not the first Ukrainian athlete to have a home struck in this war.

Football midfielder Heorhiy Sudakov reported that a Russian drone badly damaged his Kyiv flat while his wife and child were inside.