“She doesn't want to shake hands with Russian, Belarusian people. I respected her decision. What should I have done? Stayed and waited? Like, I mean, there's no thing that I could do that would have been right, so I just did what I thought was respectful towards her decision.”

And Azarenka didn’t wish to maintain having the dialog about Ukrainian gamers snubbing handshakes with Russian and Belarusian rivals - one thing that has been happening because the conflict began. She continued: “But this conversation about shaking hands is not a life-changing conversation.

“So if you guys want to keep talking about it, bring it up, make it a big deal, headlines, whatever it is, keep going. I thought it was a great tennis match. If people are going to be focusing only on handshakes or crowd, quite drunk crowd, booing in the end, that's a shame. That's probably what it is in the end of the day. It was a tennis match. We are here, tennis match. Nobody's changing lives here. We are playing tennis. We're doing our jobs. That's it.”