ST. LOUIS (AP) — Alisa Efimova stepped off the ice and slipped into a jacket, an American flag patch on her left sleeve impossible to miss, after a brilliant performance with pairs partner Misha Mitrofanov at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships on Wednesday night.
Efimova hopes to be representing the stars and stripes at the Milan Cortina Olympics next month.
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Alisa Efimova and Misha Mitrofanov compete during the pairs short program at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026, in St. Louis. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
Alisa Efimova and Misha Mitrofanov compete during the pairs short program at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026, in St. Louis. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
Alisa Efimova and Misha Mitrofanov compete during the pairs short program at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026, in St. Louis. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
Alisa Efimova and Misha Mitrofanov compete during the pairs short program at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026, in St. Louis. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
Alisa Efimova and Misha Mitrofanov compete during the pairs short program at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026, in St. Louis. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
But time is running out.
One of the Olympic requirements is that competitors are citizens of the nations they represent. And while the 28-year-old Mitrofanov was born in the U.S., the 26-year-old Efimova was born in Finland — she didn't come to the States on a full-time basis until 2023, when they became partners — leaving her in bureaucratic limbo while the American government decides her fate.
Efimova and Mitrofanov were married in February 2024. She had a green card approved in July of that year and has been seeking a waiver of the required three-year waiting period for citizenship.
The finalized U.S. squad for the Winter Games will be announced on Sunday.
“We’re hoping maybe a last-minute miracle might happen,” Mitrofanov said.
The Skating Club of Boston, where Efimova and Mitrofanov train, has done most of the legwork in pursuit of her passport. U.S. Figure Skating also would love to have arguably its best pairs team on an Olympic team carrying massive expectations.
“Most of the season has been great. To be honest, the last few weeks, it’s been more difficult than normal. We’ve had to do a little more paperwork. There’s been a great push for it,” Mitrofanov said. “Hopefully it happens, but it is out of our control. All we can do is focus on our training, focus on what we do, which is on the ice.”
They were brilliant on the Enterprise Center ice on Wednesday night.
Efimova and Mitrofanov opened their short program with a beautiful triple twist, then Mitrofanov bent low to hang on through their side-by-side triple toe loops. Their throw triple loop was spot-on, and both of them finished by pumping their fists in the air.
“Maybe two days before," Efimova said, “I couldn't shut my thought process down. I was thinking about the competition, about the skate. But as soon as I entered the rink today, this is a space I know pretty well, and I just trusted the routine I'm used to before the competition. It doesn't erase all the nerves. But I think what I'm happy about is we were still able to skate well.”
Efimova and Mitrofanov scored a season-best 75.31 points to put a healthy distance between themselves and a quartet of pursuers, led by the duo of Audrey Shin and Balazs Nagy, all of whom are also vying for one of the two U.S. pairs spots at the Winter Games.
“I think think there's a little mindset shift going through this — ‘Oh, we can deal with this situation and perform with this kind of pressure and these kinds of thoughts, maybe it’s making me a little stronger in the future,'” said Efimova, who also has represented Russia and Germany along with her native Finland in international competition.
Efimova and Mitrofanov's crisp, clean program Wednesday night stood in stark contrast to many of their closest rivals.
Shin and Nagy were second with a season-best 67.67 points, but that still left the relatively new pairing nearly eight points off the lead. Ellie Kam and Danny O’Shea, the U.S. champions two years ago, were in third with 67.13 points, even after she fell on their side-by-side triple salchows and stepped out on their throw triple loop.
Emily Chan and Spencer Howe, who are in the running for one of the Olympic spots, struggled through a disastrous program.
Chan doubled their planned triple toe loop, then somehow hit the ice before their throw triple loop — and landed hard on the ice again once they did try the element. By the time the music ended, Chan had a look of total shock on her face, Howe shook his head, and their score of 59.29 points left them with a long climb ahead in Friday night’s free skate.
At least they control their own fate where the Olympics are concerned.
Efimova and Mitrofanov are waiting on a stamp of approval from someone, somewhere — and soon.
“Of course it's in the back of our minds,” Mitrofanov said, standing in a hallway just off the ice. “However, our focus has been on skating. It's not like we're thinking on it every day, in all honesty. Even going into nationals, we knew a lot of questions like this would come up, and we wanted to take them head-on, and be like, ‘Hey, this is who we are. This is how we skate.’”
AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
Alisa Efimova and Misha Mitrofanov compete during the pairs short program at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026, in St. Louis. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
Alisa Efimova and Misha Mitrofanov compete during the pairs short program at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026, in St. Louis. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
Alisa Efimova and Misha Mitrofanov compete during the pairs short program at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026, in St. Louis. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
Alisa Efimova and Misha Mitrofanov compete during the pairs short program at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026, in St. Louis. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)
Alisa Efimova and Misha Mitrofanov compete during the pairs short program at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026, in St. Louis. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia bombarded Ukraine with hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles in a large-scale overnight attack, officials said Friday, killing at least four people in the capital. For only the second time in the nearly 4-year-old war, it used a powerful, new hypersonic missile that struck western Ukraine in a clear warning to Kyiv’s NATO allies.
The intense barrage and the launch of the nuclear-capable Oreshnik missile came days after Ukraine and its allies reported major progress toward agreeing on how to defend the country from further Moscow aggression if a U.S.-led peace deal is struck.
Europe’s leaders condemned the attack as “escalatory and unacceptable,” and the European Union's top foreign policy envoy said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reply to diplomacy was “more missiles and destruction.”
The attack also coincides with a new chill in relations between Moscow and Washington after Russia condemned the U.S. seizure of an oil tanker in the North Atlantic. It comes as U.S. President Donald Trump signaled he is on board with a hard-hitting sanctions package meant to economically cripple Moscow, which has given no public signal it is willing to budge from its maximalist demands on Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials said four people were killed and at least 25 wounded in Kyiv as apartment buildings were struck overnight.
Those killed included an emergency medical aid worker, according to Kyiv City Military Administration head Tymur Tkachenko. Four doctors and one police officer were injured while responding to the attacks, authorities said.
About half of snowy Kyiv’s apartment buildings — nearly 6,000 — were left without heat amid daytime temperatures of about minus 8 degrees Celsius (17.6 Fahrenheit), Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. Water supplies also were disrupted.
Municipal services restored power and heat to public facilities, including hospitals and maternity wards, using portable boiler units, he said.
The attack damaged the Qatari Embassy in Kyiv, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who noted that Qatar has played a key role in mediating the exchange of prisoners of war.
He called for a “clear response” from the international community, particularly from the U.S., which he said Russia takes seriously.
Ukraine’s Security Service said it identified debris from the Oreshnik missile in the Lviv region in the country's west. It was fired from Russia’s Kapustin Yar test range near the Caspian Sea in southwestern Russia and targeted civilian infrastructure, investigators said.
“I heard a loud, shocking explosion, and it’s normal at this time of the war to hear these things here," said Lviv resident Kristofer Chokhovich, who said he was an American. "I just want everyone in the world to know that Ukraine is strong and we don’t care how many missiles you send.”
Another resident, Ulyana Fedun, described the attack as “very unpleasant” but not scary because “we’ve been living in this state for four years.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry said the attack was a retaliation to what Moscow claimed was a Ukrainian drone strike on one of Putin’s residences last month. Both Trump and Ukraine rejected the Russian claim.
Moscow didn’t say where the Oreshnik hit, but Russian media and military bloggers said it targeted an underground natural gas storage facility in the Lviv region. Western military aid flows to Ukraine from a supply hub in Poland just across the border.
Putin has previously said the Oreshnik streaks to its target at Mach 10, “like a meteorite,” and is immune to any missile defense system. Several of them used in a conventional strike could be as devastating as a nuclear attack, according to Putin, who has warned the West that Russia could use it against allies of Kyiv that allow it to strike inside Russia with longer-range missiles.
Ukrainian intelligence says the missile has six warheads, each carrying six submunitions.
Russia first used the Oreshnik missile on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro in November 2024. Analysts say it gives Russia a new element of psychological warfare, unnerving Ukrainians and intimidating Western countries that aid Ukraine.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Ukraine would be initiating international action in response to the use of the missile, including an urgent meeting of the U.N. Security Council and a meeting of the Ukraine-NATO Council.
The Security Council scheduled a Monday afternoon meeting on Ukraine.
“Such a strike close to EU and NATO border is a grave threat to the security on the European continent and a test for the transatlantic community. We demand strong responses to Russia’s reckless actions,” he said in a post on X.
Ukraine’s request for an emergency meeting of the Security Council has been conveyed to the council, and six of the 15 members have called for a meeting on Monday, but no date has been set yet, a U.N. diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity because discussions have been private.
Pope Leo XIV, speaking at the Vatican, urged the international community to keep pushing for peace and end the suffering in Ukraine.
“Faced with this tragic situation, the Holy See strongly reiterates the pressing need for an immediate ceasefire, and for dialogue motivated by a sincere search for ways leading to peace,” the pontiff told ambassadors to the Vatican from around the world.
The leaders of Britain, France and Germany said they spoke about the attack and deemed it “escalatory and unacceptable.”
EU foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said the Oreshnik launch was “meant as a warning to Europe and to the U.S.”
“Putin doesn’t want peace, Russia’s reply to diplomacy is more missiles and destruction,” Kallas wrote on social media.
Several districts in Kyiv were hit in the overnight attack, according to Tkachenko, the city's military administration chief. In the Desnyanskyi district, a drone crashed onto the roof of a multistory building and the first two floors of another residential building were damaged.
In the Dnipro district, parts of a drone damaged a multistory building and a fire broke out.
Dmytro Karpenko's windows were shattered in the attack on Kyiv. When he saw that his neighbor's house was burning, he rushed to help him.
“What Russia is doing, of course, shows that they do not want peace. But people really want peace, people are suffering, people are dying," the 45-year old said.
Vasilisa Stepanenko in Kyiv, Ukraine, Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed.
Follow the AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
The body of a paramedic lies on the ground in the snow outside a residential building damaged by a Russian strike on Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
A residential building is damaged after a Russian air strike during a heavy snow storm in Kyiv, Ukraine, early Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy, left, and British Defense Secretary John Healey talk in Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Danylo Antoniuk)
This photo provided by the Ukrainian Security Service on Friday, Jan. 9, 2026, shows a fragment believed to be a part of a Russian Oreshnik intermediate range hypersonic ballistic missile that hit the Lviv region. (Ukrainian Security Service via AP)
This photo provided by the Ukrainian Security Service on Friday, Jan. 9, 2026, shows a fragment believed to be a part of a Russian Oreshnik intermediate range hypersonic ballistic missile that hit the Lviv region. (Ukrainian Security Service via AP)
A rescue worker tries to put out a fire at a residential building damaged after a Russian strike on Kyiv, Ukraine, on Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
A residential building is seen damaged after a Russian strike in Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
The dead body of a paramedic lies on the ground in front of a residential building damaged by a Russian strike on Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
A residential building burns after a Russian strike in Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
A residential building is seen damaged after a Russian strike in Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
Rescue workers put out a fire at a residential building damaged by a Russian strike in Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
Rescue workers put out a fire at a residential building damaged by a Russian strike in Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
A residential building burns after a Russian strike in Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
