Jenya Kazbekova

Ievgeniia (Jenya) Serikivna Kazbekova (Євгенія Серіківна Казбекова, born 1996) is a Ukrainian competition climber, and a member of the 2024 Ukraine Olympic team.

Family and early life
Kazbekova was born in 1996 in Dnipro. Her grandparents were climbers; her grandmother won the championship of the Soviet Union in a competition in Crimea, the same place where her parents, Serik Kazbekov and Natalia Perlova, met and later owned a hotel. Perlova herself was a competition climber, the Ukrainian champion, and the 2002 overall bouldering world cup winner. Her father won a silver medal in speed climbing at the 1993 UIAA Climbing World Championships in Innsbruck, Austria. Her parents regularly brought Kazbekova to competitions with them, and Perlova recalls Kazbekova already scrambling on the rocks of Crimea at the age of seven months, on family climbing trips there.

In early 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine escalating the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, Kazbekova, her parents, and younger sister Rafael Kazbekova (herself a competition climber) fled Kyiv for Germany. She has continued to be a prominent and staunch advocate for Ukrainian interests in the climbing world. In part in response to her efforts, in 2022, the International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC) cancelled several events scheduled to be held in Russia, and suspended all Russian athletes from their competitions. Kazbekova's family later moved to Manchester, England. Kazbekova herself is primarily based in Salt Lake City in the US, where the US climbing team trains.

Climbing career
, Kazbekova's highest-level international competition climbing result is fourth place in bouldering at the 2019 IFSC Climbing World Championships. She has been the Ukrainian champion from 2012 to 2021. Outdoors, she redpointed her first graded sport climbing route at age eight, and her first  graded route at age 11. She has solved the graded bouldering problem called Partage in Fontainebleu in France, the  sport climbing route Pati Naso in Siurana in Spain, and the  graded sport route Güllich at the Redstone crag in Crimea (and as the first female free ascent) in 2017.

Kazbekova was one of the contenders for a place in sport climbing at the 2020 Summer Olympics, but fell short after a knee injury and illness prevented her from showing her best. Through competing in the 2024 Olympic Qualifier Series in Shanghai and Budapest, Kazbekova won a position in the women's combined bouldering and lead climbing event of sport climbing at the 2024 Summer Olympics, one of 20 competitors there. She hopes to use her position at the Olympics to remind the world to help Ukraine against Russia.