Who can stop him? Not Katye, that's for sure.

On Sunday morning at eight o’clock, Marta Kostyuk received a photo on her phone: her parents’ house in Kyiv, surrounded by a plume of smoke. A Russian missile had just struck a hundred meters from her home. Her mother, her sister, and her great-aunt were inside. A few hours later, the world No. 22, WTA No. 17, the 15th seed, walked onto Court Simonne-Mathieu to play her first-round match. She won 6–2 6–3. In tears on the mic after the match, she told reporters what she had been carrying with her the whole time: “I spent the whole morning feeling nauseous. If it had been a hundred meters closer, I wouldn’t have a mother or a sister anymore.” In her press conference, she took out her phone and showed them the photo. She also regrets that, in her view, the world has gradually forgotten about the war. She keeps using her voice to talk about it, match after match.

On court, Kostyuk is quite simply the most dominant clay-court player of 2026. Thirteen straight wins on the surface, including the title in Madrid where she beat Baptiste, Gauff, and Sabalenka in the same week. Her physical, aggressive, and precise baseline game is a perfect match for the demands of Parisian clay. Katie Volynets, 23 years old, WTA No. 52, is a baseline player with a formidable return whose percentiles on break points converted are high on clay. She beat Olmos in the first round to reach this second round. But against Kostyuk in this kind of form, and in this state of mind, the difference in level is structural.