Oleksandr Petrovskyi

Oleksandr Petrovskyi was born in 1972 in Rustavi

Petrovskyi was born on 9 June 1972 in Rustavi, in Soviet Georgia, to a Georgian noble family with Armenian roots. As a child he moved with his mother to Dnipro in Ukraine and took the surname of his stepfather. In the 1990s he was named Honored Master of Sports of Ukraine in judo and worked to develop martial sports in the city.

In 2003 he founded the charity foundation "Solidarity" to support humanitarian projects. He backed democratic candidates in the 2004 presidential election and was then persecuted by security forces. After Viktor Yanukovych won in 2010, he left Ukraine for a time.

He returned during the Revolution of Dignity and from March 2014 organized a public center in Dnipro to resist Russian saboteurs. He helped return a military hospital to state ownership and supplied equipment to the volunteer battalion "Dnipro-1". Since 2022 he has supported the volunteer battalion "Solidarity", made up mainly of people from Georgia.

He has worked on dialogue between Orthodox Christians and the Jewish community of Dnipro, and funded programs of the "Menorah" Jewish center. He funded a Sunday school for the Armenian community, whose church was consecrated in 2018, and received the Order of Saints Sahak and Mesrop from Garegin II. Since 2018 his foundation has also supported Ukrainian cinema.