On May 24, the day of Marta Kostyuk’s first-round match at the French Open, a Russian missile destroyed a building about 300 feet from her family’s home in Kyiv. Three hours later, she walked onto the clay at Roland-Garros and won in straight sets. At the press conference afterward, she said, “I felt sick. If it was 100 meters closer, I probably wouldn’t have a mom and a sister today.” Russia claimed it had been targeting military command centers, but what it actually hit, with 600 drones and 90 missiles, was a Kyiv water-supply facility, the National Chernobyl Museum, the Ukraine Foreign Ministry building, a market, several schools, and dozens of residential buildings.

At the beginning of this season, Kostyuk was No. 26 in the world. She arrived at Flushing Meadows last week for the U.S. Open with a career-high ranking of No. 11, having barreled her way toward the WTA top 10 during a particularly remarkable 17-match winning streak on clay earlier this spring, featuring two titles and two back-to-back runs to the semifinals of Roland-Garros and Wimbledon. In New York, she’s cruised through three consecutive matches without dropping a set; on Sunday in Louis Armstrong Stadium, the Czech Linda Nosková awaits her in the round of 16.

Kostyuk’s ascent has come as Russia’s bombing campaign against Ukraine, and particularly Kyiv, intensifies amid the country’s dire shortage of air-defense weaponry. Kostyuk now occupies a kind of perverse dual reality. She is an emblem of national pride and perseverance, an aggressive player with balletic movement and a pair of cornflower blue eyes. She is a magnet for high-end designers and parasocial admiration. In the midst of her breakout season, as she continues to amass fame and fortune and victories with glamorous Instagram posts and lucrative sponsorship deals and custom-fit Wilson dresses, not a single moment of it changes Kostyuk’s other existence in Kyiv, which mostly plays out in her mind. It’s the city where she was born and raised, the city another country has spent more than four years assaulting, burning down hospitals and blowing up energy grids with little regard for civilian life. Kostyuk thinks about this nearly........

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