Sergei Polunin: ‘I always liked Putin. I loved his energy’ (2025)

After I interviewed Sergei Polunin, and watched him being photographed, I tried to imagine how I’d describe him. He’s a Ukrainian ballet dancer. He might be the best ballet dancer in the world. He has a beautiful body and a slightly goofy-looking but still very attractive, face. On his chest, he has a tattoo of Vladimir Putin’s face. And when you put Putin’s face on your chest, you are attracting attention to yourself in a very specific way.

Polunin said, “When I was a kid, I always liked Putin. I loved him. I loved his energy. No matter what people were saying, for some reason inside I knew he’s trying to do something good.”

A day or two later, the world became aware of another of Polunin’s opinions, this time via Instagram. He had posted, “Man should be a man and woman should be a woman. Masculine and feminine energies creates balance. That’s a reason you got balls … Females now trying to take on the man role because you don’t f*** them … Man are wolves, man are lions … Stop being weak, be a man, be a warrior.”

He also posted, and then deleted, this, “Let’s slap fat people when you see them. It will help them and encourage them to lose some fat. No respect for laziness!”

Polunin was dropped by the Paris Opera Ballet, for a forthcoming production of Swan Lake. He did not share their values, said Aurélie Dupont, the company’s artistic director. One of its dancers, Adrien Couvez, called Polunin a “disgrace” and an “embarrassment”. Couvez said, “This man has nothing to do with us.”

Had Polunin gone mad? Was he seeking attention? Or did he believe these things? I knew that he liked being controversial. For instance, he’d said, “You don’t like Donald Trump because he speaks the truth and speaks his mind!!!” And he’d posted a picture of his Putin tattoo in November, on the day Ukrainians remember the mass starvation they suffered at the hands of the USSR in the Thirties. That was a provocation; many Ukrainians see Putin as a Soviet apologist.

Then something went wrong. Getting to the top freaked him out. “Suddenly,” he says, “there is no path. Nothing structured. You can do anything, but, at the same time, you have to build a path. It’s like nothing is there.”

Between the ages of three and twenty-one, Polunin’s life was about training. In other words, he didn’t have a life, or much of one, apart from the training. But he had a goal – to be the best. Then, one day, he became the best, and after that he started to fall apart.

“I wasn’t trained for that,” he says. “The mind wasn’t trained for that kind of freedom. Ballet is very narrow. Every day is the same. For 20 years you’re going to learn the same instructions. Then you’re going to do the performance. They tell you what time you come in, and if you don’t, you’ll be told off.”

One day you reach the top – you become the company’s principal dancer – and people don’t order you around so much. Now you have to think for yourself. The trouble is, your mind is years, even decades, behind the curve.

What caused the problem, as Polunin puts it, was “the smell of freedom”. After a lifetime in the salt mines of ballet school, freedom is hard to manage for any length of time. “After a while,” he says, “life beats you down. You have to structure yourself. It took me months and months and months …”

At 22 years old, Sergei Polunin was the youngest principal dancer the Royal Ballet had had. He’d spent his whole life trying to get to that point. And then he walked out. This was the start of his breakdown. The seeds of the breakdown, of course, lay deep in his past.

We talk about his family in Kherson. He has said that he didn’t mind being poor, because everybody he knew was poor; he didn’t even notice it. His mother, Galina, he tells me, was a seriously gifted creative force – she could “make anything with her hands”. She made and designed clothes. Also, “she was great at chess”. As an adult, Galina would wish that her parents had been more pushy with her when she was young.

Polunin’s father, Vladimir, was a construction worker. He was “always smiling”, says Polunin. In pictures, Vladimir is handsome and masculine; Galina is pretty and feminine. To listen to their son, life in Kherson was an idyll.

Then the idyll broke up.

There are various ways you could explain the break-up of Polunin’s childhood. You could say it happened because his father went to Portugal to make money working on building sites. Or because his grandmother went to Greece to work as a carer. But really, they did this to make extra money so the nine-year-old Sergei could attend the Kiev Choreographic School. The family broke up because, collectively, they wanted Sergei to go to the big city and become a dancer.

He particularly missed his father. They had spent a lot of time together before Sergei went to Kiev and Vladimir went to Portugal. Vladimir talked to the documentary-maker Steven Cantor in Dancer, a 2016 film about Polunin, and you can sense how terribly sad he is when he says, “I refused to believe we were going to be separated.”

Still, they were. Galina and Sergei moved into a tiny flat in Kiev, where they shared a bedroom. Sergei’s career as a dancer was about to begin, but his family had atomised, and the family had atomised because of his career as a dancer. Over the years, this understanding would gradually seep into his mind.

For the next hour, we talk about the same few things. How he worked incredibly hard to become a brilliant dancer, and the toll this has taken on his life. How he trained obsessively. How the process of training can become a sort of masochistic pleasure, or at least something that blocks out the real world. But the real world is always there, however well you dance.

During all of this, we circle what I believe to be the main subject – the breakdown Polunin had, which, I will come to think, might still be ongoing.

He tries to explain what, at best, he’s trying to do on stage. If you work hard enough, he says, if you know the moves with absolute precision, you can afford to let yourself go on stage, so your real emotions show through. I’ve watched him at his best; he leaps and lands with a crispness you can’t quite believe. He cites one of his heroes, Marlon Brando: “He said, as an actor, you shouldn’t let them know where you’re going to hit them from. Keep them guessing.”

Then he says, “We always try for perfection. It’s always in me. My brain always works like that. I’m not trying to make anything ugly, for sure. But inside, it’s different. Outside, the body might be beautiful. But inside, it could be quite different.” Which makes me think of his tattoos – graffiti inked by the dark impulses of his mind all over his beautiful body.

He went to the Royal Ballet School in London at the age of 13 – the junior school in Richmond Park, and then the senior school in Covent Garden. Now he was on his own. At the age of 16, he won the Prix de Lausanne; at 17 he was the Young British Dancer of the Year; at 19 he was a soloist; at 20 the Royal Ballet’s youngest principal dancer. Valentino Zucchetti, Polunin’s contemporary, told Steven Cantor, “We used to call him the graceful beast, because he’s sort of like a lion, the way he tackles a step … but then, as soon as the step is airborne, so in control and clean and pure, which is a rare mix.” When the teenage Polunin went out in the evenings, he would sometimes pass out because he’d trained so hard. He trained so hard, he said, “because I knew that was my chance to get my family back together”.

But it never happened. Vladimir and Galina split up. In London, Sergei kept training hard. “Working 12, 14 hours a day, 6 days a week, 11 months a year. At the beginning, you think, this isn’t possible. You become green. White. You become ill-looking. The exhaustion. The hours. You don’t see anything else. You don’t know what life is. How other people live. It’s such a weird, closed world. It’s like an army.” But he’d signed up. If he couldn’t get his family back, he could at least become the best. Emotionally, he became “more cold”. He kept going. Then he did become the best.

Speaking about the world outside ballet, Polunin says, “I split the world into good and evil … We all have good and bad inside of us. And the world is the same.”

Where is the evil coming from? “It’s just … inside of you. I always knew, the darkness wants me, and the light wants me. And it’s always a choice. And in a way, darkness is more fun. More fun, but it’s an easy path. The light is much more difficult, and it’s longer, and it takes a lot of strength.”

I ask him if he can always tell the difference between the two. He says, “Yes. I can.” But there are times when he is overcome by his darker impulses. “Almost like I know you shouldn’t do that. But you do it anyway.” Sometimes, he says, he feels strong. But when he weakens, bad thoughts can “crawl in”.

He says, “That’s a fight I see in the world. That’s a fight I see in human beings. And that’s a fight I see in myself.” We live in a society, he says, with “no mentorship. TV doesn’t teach you life. School doesn’t teach you life.”

When he reached the top, when he became the best, he says he was “super-disappointed”. We talk about other people this has happened to. Andre Agassi and John McEnroe come to mind. They focused on reaching the top. Getting to the top wasn’t what they’d hoped it would be. As for Polunin, he thought his life would change. It didn’t. He wasn’t even rich – he made around £3,000 a month. “No fame, no money … Nowhere to grow.” So he walked out of the Royal Ballet. He walked along the street. It was snowing. He took his clothes off and rolled in the snow.

There were headlines. He had become the Bad Boy of Ballet. He took cocaine, LSD, Ecstasy. His feeling, he says, was, “You think I’m bad? I’m going to be the worst.”

The breakdown continued. Drugs, certainly. But he says he didn’t sleep around; he believes love is something very rare and precious. He had a girlfriend years ago, another ballet student, in his early twenties. “We split up. It was, like, love. Amazing thing in my life.” They split up because, “It was time. You feel it. Wasn’t me, wasn’t her. It was just time. It happens.” They’d been together for three years.

After this, he was single, “for many years. Because I was so unstable with emotions.” He says, “A relationship is like another layer of emotions. I didn’t listen to music; I didn’t have a girlfriend. To be stable, I had to square my world. As soon as I would hear music, it would be like: too much emotion. I didn’t read books, because they would influence me too much.”

This lasted four years, in his early twenties. Since then he’s had an on-off relationship with the Russian ballerina Natalia Osipova. She had made a professional decision not to get mixed up with him. She had moved from Russia to the Royal Ballet after Polunin walked out. She was cast in the ballet Giselle, but couldn’t find a partner. She emailed Polunin. He agreed to rehearse with her. Artistically, they were a perfect match. For a while, they became a couple. Polunin had her name tattooed on his hand. They’re not together now.

In the years since he left the Royal Ballet, Polunin’s career has been up and down. For a while, he worked in Russia at the Stanislavsky Music Theatre. Then there was the video, shot by David LaChapelle, which went viral. Last summer he performed Take Me to Church in Crimea, which he entered illegally, and which means he’s not allowed into Ukraine until further notice. So he can’t easily see his parents or his grandmothers, who are, he says, now too old to travel.

This year, he appears in The White Crow, a rather brilliant film with a screenplay by David Hare about the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev. Ralph Fiennes directs. Before that, he’d played another Russian, Count Rudolph Andrenyi in Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express.

The White Crow is about how both communist Russia and ballet can be repressive. But ballet is an art; when you move beyond the repression, it’s about expressing yourself. When he dances in Paris, Nureyev decides to defect; he wants to move from the realm of repression to the realm of art, where he can be who he wants to be and say what he wants to say. Polunin does not play Nureyev. He plays his friend from the Kirov ballet, Yuri Soloviev (a perfectionist who committed suicide at the age of 36). But still, he’s good.

In real life, his situation is not Nureyev’s. But there are parallels. Nureyev, too, is an outsider. He really wants to be the best. Then his crisis arrives and he defects. In contrast, Polunin is not trying to run away from repression; if you read his posts, he seems to want to import it.

We go upstairs. I watch Polunin being photographed. He takes off his shirt. He has scarred his upper body. “I thought a man should have scars,” he once said. On his stomach is a Kolovrat symbol, a spiky totalitarian-looking shape that symbolises the sun. There’s a Grim Reaper; there’s the church in Kherson where Polunin was christened, and the words “Life is a short trip”. There are pictures of stars who died young – Heath Ledger, James Dean. On his hands are the initials DLCH, for David LaChapelle. There is a design on one hand for Russia and on the other for the Ukraine. There’s the name Natasha. Also the name Mickey Rourke, who’s a friend. Above Polunin’s hip: “I am not a human. I am not a god. I am hwo I am.” The “w” and the “h” are reversed. A simple mistake, apparently.

Later, Polunin will send his infamous posts. Later still, he agrees to send me an update on his thoughts. Men and women, he writes, are opposites. That’s why they attract each other. But men are being told that women don’t need them any more. The result: “Man feels lost, they aren’t needed they become weak … it’s hard to tell where is man and where is woman … that can lead to Decomposition and Extinction of a nation.”

In the studio, I walk up to him. Soon, Aurélie Dupont will read his post. The Paris Opera Ballet will dispense with his services.

For now, we shake hands. I look at his chest. Putin looks back.

The White Crow opens on March 22

Shoot credits
Styling Hannah Rogers. Grooming Nat Schmitt using Clarins. Sergei Polunin wears multicoloured blazer, £2,690, and trousers, £1,290, alexandermcqueen.com; black trousers, £640, Prada (matchesfashion.com)