You're reading: BuzzFeed: Boxing champ Klitschko steps into the ring over Ukraine’s European future

It’s been a rough week for pro-western forces in Ukraine, which looked set to sign a crucial agreement with the European Union only recently but now appear to be pirouetting 180 degrees back towards Moscow. After President Viktor Yanukovych snuck off to the Kremlin for informal negotiations with Vladimir Putin last weekend, parliament postponed a vote on bill that would release jailed former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, breaking a condition pushed by the bloc for the agreement to go ahead.

The tug-of-war between Brussels and Moscow has all the twists and outsized personalities of a classic soap opera. If Yanukovych is the stern, mansion-inhabiting patriarch and Tymoshenko its golden-braided damsel in distress, that makes boxing legend turned opposition leader Vitali Klitschko its brooding strong and silent type. In just a few years since his semi-retirement from the sport — he still holds the World Boxing Council heavyweight title, but has not fought since September 2012 — Klitschko, now a lawmaker in Ukraine’s parliament, has leveraged his national hero status in this former Soviet republic of 46 million to emerge as one of the country’s strongest pro-European voices.