“BAZARA 0 Fight Club IV” adds its eleventh confirmed matchup: a Latvian firefighter who has been trading championship rounds since 2015 meets a 19-year-old from Tallinn who has been in a Muay Thai gym since he was six years old. We’re pleased to announce a fight between Raimonds Aukštikalnis vs. Ruslan Mitjajev!
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For Raimonds Aukštikalnis, fighting is the second job; he works as a firefighter during the day, trains clients privately, and has still managed to build up his fighter’s career. Reviewing the 2015 season in domestic professional kickboxing, sportacentrs.com listed him among the young talents out of the “Muay Thai Academy” club who had just been signed by King of Kings, and ranked his knockout that year the third-best in the country.
In February of 2018 at KOK 54, Aukštikalnis won the KOK Middleweight Grand Prix by extra-round split decision after three rounds. By that October he was 6–0 at home in Latvia with wins over Sprangh, Valdemar Kulda and other ranked KOK men — and then Daniel Forsberg handed him a defeat. He outbattled Britain’s Reon “The Beast” Wong to earn the rematch, and lost it in Helsinki in 2019 with the vacant KOK World Middleweight title on the line.
Then came the next belt hunt: at LNK Fight Night 14 in February of 2020, Aukštikalnis knocked out Colombian-Spanish fighter Jeronimo Sacasas in the first round with an overhand right in a WKN European super middleweight title eliminator, earning a shot at French champion Samuel Dbili in Nîmes. However, the pandemic pushed that date twice. He is, as of today, a WKN European Super Middleweight Champion, KOK 85 kg Grand Prix champion and two-time Yakuza Fight champion. Aukštikalnis took a four-man Yakuza Fight tournament once, and then again at “Yakuza Fight 8: Champions”.
Riga saw him last on January 10th at “BAZARA 0 Fight Club III”, against Ahmet Kilic, an Alash Pride champion who had piled up 15 wins and 10 knockouts in his first professional year. His younger brother Raivo Aukštikalnis fought on that same card and lost to Madars Bertholds-Fleminas.
Ruslan “Flying Dutchman” Mitjajev is only 19 and fights out of Spordiklubi Garant in Tallinn, where he has spent twelve years under coach Sergei Vinokurov after starting Muay Thai at six. By his own accounting he stands at 12 fights, 11 wins, one loss and six knockouts, with an IFMA Muay Thai world title, a WBC international belt, a Baltic title and fifteen national championships behind him.
The number that should concern his opponent Aukštikalnis is how old—or, well, young—he was when he did most of it. On November 9th, 2024, at “The League 7” in Tallinn’s Tondiraba Ice Hall, Mitjajev entered an eight-man tournament and won the whole thing in one night, at seventeen years old. The League’s own scorecards show him outpointing Donny Smith 30–26 in the quarter-final, stopping 24-year-old Dmitry Salamatin by first-round TKO in the semi, then shutting out 29-year-old Sergei Makejev, a 14-fight veteran of the Baltic circuit, 30–24 in the final. He is credited with the WBC Muay Thai Baltic title from that night. Four months later, at “The League 8”, he added the WBC Muay Thai Super Middleweight International title against Czech fighter Domenico Naswetter.
His brother Roman Mitjajev fights out of the same gym and now sits inside the WBC Muay Thai World Light Heavyweight Top 20. Ruslan has said the two of them grew up measuring themselves against each other, and that as a boy he was always half a step behind. Both brothers lost the coach they describe as a second father in a motorcycle accident. Mitjajev says the loss rewired him and he stopped trying to win on points and started closing shows.
His single defeat came the hard way: at “The League X” in November of 2025, at an eight-man K-1 tournament carrying a €20,000 jackpot, which is the largest single prize reported in Estonian combat sports. Mitjajev fought his way to the final on a broken nose and damaged legs. “I reached the final and hoped for a miracle,” he said afterwards, “but unfortunately I was knocked out.” Four months later, Mitjajev, who had been in camp for three unbroken months, headlined “The League 11” and won.
