Daria Meshcheriakova

Daria Meshcheriakova is a Ukrainian sports and political journalist. Born in Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, she was educated at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and the University of Jena. She lived in Kyiv, working for Segodnya and other outlets, before the Russian invasion in 2022. She continued to work after she took refuge in Kosovo. At the 2023 French Open, she engaged tennis player Aryna Sabalenka in a pair of exchanges about the invasion, leading the player to skip her next couple of press conferences.

Early life and education

Meshcheriakova was born in the city of Luhansk in the Donbas, eastern Ukraine, to a Russian father from Rostov-on-Don and a Ukrainian mother. She spent much of her childhood with her grandmother in Millerovo, Russia, but would eventually cut off that side of the family when ethnic tensions escalated. She went to the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in the Ukrainian capital beginning in 2006. Her parents remained in Russian-occupied Luhansk after briefly staying with family across the Russian border. There, resuming her journalism work, she wrote and gave many interviews about the war for Kosovo media and covered sports for the Ukrainian website Tribuna. She twice confronted world tennis player Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus in the press room; Sabalenka had met multiple times with Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, an ally of Russia, and reportedly signed a letter endorsing him after a series of anti-government protests in 2020. At a first-round press conference on 28 May, when asked by Meshcheriakova what she had to say "to the world" about the war, Sabalenka offered her most direct words on the subject to date, including: "How can we support the war? Nobody, normal people will never support it". Meshcheriakova followed up at Sabalenka's second-round press conference on 31 May, asking about her reported association with Lukashenko; when Sabalenka refused to comment, Meshcheriakova said, "So you basically support everything because you cannot speak up? You're not a small person, Aryna", before the moderator cut in to change the subject. Meshcheriakova did not have her press credentials revoked but also did not encounter Sabalenka again, having planned 3 June to be her last day at the tournament.