Kostyuk was overcome with emotion following her historic meeting with Svitolina, which came a day after one of Moscow’s largest assaults on Ukraine in recent months.<\/p>\n
She has been vocal in her criticism of Russian players who have failed to denounce the war and, like her compatriots, has maintained a policy of not shaking hands with opponents from Russia and its ally Belarus.<\/p>\n
On the apparent reluctance of her Russian counterparts to speak about the war, Kostyuk said: “For me, it’s not frustrating anymore. They are all grown-ups. <\/p>\n
“They are clearly aware of what’s going on. If this is something that they want to avoid talking about, they have to live with this, not me. <\/p>\n
“I don’t know how you can sleep at night peacefully when you know that this is going on and you have nothing to say about it.”<\/p>\n
Asked about facing a Ukrainian player next, Andreeva told the media: “It doesn’t matter who I play. I really try to play against the ball that is coming at me and focus on the game.”<\/p>\n
Driven to deliver the title for Ukraine, Kostyuk will head into her semi-final on a 17-match winning streak on the clay this season.<\/p>\n
“I still think it [the title] is very far. I have two matches to play and hopefully you will come and support me on Thursday,” Kostyuk told the crowd, who gave her a standing ovation and waved Ukrainian flags. <\/p>\n
Asked if she would perform another backflip at Roland Garros, just as she did after beating Andreeva to win the Madrid Open last month, Kostyuk added: “In Madrid I practised the day before the final. <\/p>\n
“I don’t need to practise here – I did it a month ago – but I promised I will only do it again when I win a final.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kostyuk was overcome with emotion following her historic meeting with Svitolina, which came a day after one of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":710421,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593],"class_list":["post-710420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=710420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710420\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/710421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=710420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=710420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=710420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}