‘Vikings’ Star Katheryn Winnick Warns Against Ukraine War Fatigue: “We Can’t Forget”

Vikings star Katheryn Winnick made her character Lagertha — a shield maiden, or female warrior — as tough and determined as any of the male warriors on the popular History drama.

And she’s a a kick-ass woman in real life, having earned her first black belt at 13 and opened three martial arts studios in her native Toronto by age 21. But Winnick says her onscreen bravado in Vikings is nothing compared to the fighting spirit she has seen among the Ukrainian people as they defend her family’s ancestral homeland against a continuing Russian onslaught.

“Yes, I may play a warrior on TV. But they’re the real warriors,” Winnick tells The Hollywood Reporter as her fundraising efforts include serving as a UNITED24 Ambassador, alongside fellow actors Liev Schreiber, Mark Strong and Mark Hamill, and her charity The Winnick Foundation partnering with Ukrainian organizations to help rebuild the country.

She insists that, despite her celebrity platform, her most effective tool to help Ukraine is amplifying the voices and lives of ordinary Ukrainians.

“Here are doctors and lawyers and mothers and wives doing their part by sewing up armor or helping people on the front line or doing whatever they possibly can. They’re the real warriors, the people that are right there in Ukraine, not backing down and they will never back down,” she adds with confidence during a Zoom call from her home in Los Angeles.

Winnick has visited Ukraine on a number of occasions in recent years, and specifically Irpin, a neighborhood near Kyiv that sustained heavy civilian deaths and destruction during a Russian occupation in 2022. “Not only did I get a chance to go there firsthand and see the destroyed buildings and schools and apartments, it was amazing to see where the efforts are going: In the first year I was part of raising $19.5 million to rebuild 18 residential buildings,” she recounts.

In March 2023, Winnick was tapped by Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to lead the UNITED24’s Rebuild Ukraine initiative to help people return to new homes. She recalls speaking to an 11-year-old girl whose family moved to Irpin from Sloviansk in 2014 after the first Russian invasion and who had to leave her home for a second time in 2022 when the wider conflict broke out.

“It’s heartbreaking to see how families have to relive this more than once and have to rebuild their lives, starting from scratch,” Winnick says. The reconstruction effort comes as Ukraine battles war fatigue in the West amid a battlefield stalemate 18 months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion.

That’s had Ukraine President Zelensky in Washington D.C. and elsewhere arm-twisting politicians to keep much-needed money and military aid flowing to his war-ravaged country. Winnick, who had a Zoom call a week ago with Zelensky and other U24 ambassadors, has a warning for international backers losing focus or interest in supporting Ukraine and and forgetting Russia’s continuing aggression.

“We can’t forget. We can’t stop helping. We need to do everything we possibly can, because freedom is on the line,” she tells THR. With the attention of Ukraine’s U.S. and Western allies recently shifting to the Israel–Hamas war, Winnick sees peril in Ukraine falling down the global news agenda.

“As much as there’s politics involved, I’m coming from a place of humanity and love and support and that’s where my interests have always laid, where freedom and life should not be eliminated because someone comes in and wants to take everything over,” she adds.