By Philip O’Connor
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – When Ukrainian MMA fighter Yaroslav Amosov beat Douglas Lima to win Bellator’s welterweight title in June 2021, little did he know that defending his belt would take second place to defending his home village of Irpin from the Russian invasion.
He makes his long-awaited return to mixed martial arts to face American Logan Storley in a title fight in Dublin next Saturday, a year and a day after Russia’s ‘special operation’ saw him abandon his sporting career to join the military.
“I feel the great support of the Ukrainian people. I have a lot of support and it gives me a lot of strength,” he told Reuters in a Zoom interview from Dublin, where he is training for the event.
“I am very grateful to our people for supporting me like this, and I will do everything to please my nation.”
The 29-year-old’s experience of combat was strictly limited to the cage before he signed up to defend his hometown, first driving his family to safety before returning to Irpin to take part in the battle to drive out the Russian invaders.
“At first, I wanted them (family) to leave with my friends’ families but there were too many people, children, and there was great danger, so my friends and I made the decision that we’d take them out by ourselves and then come back,” he explained.
“Because there was a lot of traffic, there was a very big traffic jam. I was sitting behind the wheel for 36 hours.”
BATTLEFIELD TACTICS
Despite his undoubted skill in hand-to-hand combat, Amosov had to learn battlefield tactics and how to handle weapons before he joined the fray.
“Before that (the war) I had no military training and I tried not to touch the weapons — although I may have liked how they looked, but I tried not to touch them,” he said.
“I think, as for every person, when he first gets into military activities he has to get used to it at first.”
A video of Amosov retrieving his championship belt from his mother’s home after Irpin was liberated, posted on April 1 last year, went viral and became a symbol of the relief of his fellow townspeople.
“Everyone was happy that the occupation was over and that many people could go out, they could just eat and drink and not be afraid of being shot,” Amosov said, adding that of course the war was not yet over.
“SOMETIMES THEY HIT KYIV”
“There are no hostilities (in Irpin), everything is normal, but no-one knows … sometimes (Russians) launch missiles that can still hit and if you watch the news, you can see that sometimes they hit Kyiv and different cities in our country.
“Sometimes they can hit just an ordinary civilian house, where people are just living, sleeping, doing their own thing, where there is no military activity and it’s not a military facility, it’s just peaceful cities where people just live,” he added.
Amosov pulled out of a proposed title fight with Britain’s Michael Page scheduled for May 13 last year to continue his military service, which allowed Storley to step in. He beat Page to win the interim title by split decision.
Amosov and Storley will now face off in Dublin for the second time with the undisputed title on the line, and the Ukrainian says his layoff from MMA while fighting for his country will not affect him.
“If I was about 20 years old, it probably would have made some difference that I hadn’t fought for a year,” he said.
“But now I’m 29 and I’ve fought a lot in different competitions and gained a lot of experience and now it won’t be a problem for me.”
(Reporting by Philip O’Connor; Editing by Ken Ferris)
