Analysis | Away from war, Ukraine’s soccer stars ready for battle

Shakhtar has not played a game at Donbas Arena for a decade. The 2014 Russia-engineered insurgency in eastern Ukraine saw pro-Kremlin forces eventually seize Donetsk and drive its top team to Lviv, in Ukraine’s west. In the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Shakhtar’s existence turned all the more nomadic — the club has “hosted” European opponents in stadiums in Poland and Germany.

The Donbas Arena is now a forlorn husk of what it once was, damaged by war and lost behind enemy lines. Ukrainian forces released footage from a reconnaissance drone they flew over Donetsk in February, circling over the abandoned stadium that was once a theater of Ukrainian dreams, the place where President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a 2022 speech addressed to the Russian invaders, said he “rooted with the locals for our Ukrainian guys” a decade prior.

But Ukrainian soccer has hardly retreated. Shakhtar Donetsk still punches above its weight on the European stage. And on Monday, Ukraine’s national team will play its first game at this year’s European championships. The match, a group stage fixture against Romania in Munich, is a contest the more-fancied Ukrainian side will hope to win. But the stakes are much higher than the three points up for grabs.

“Before [the war], when you’re fighting on the pitch, you are thinking only about the result,” Ukrainian head coach Sergiy Rebrov recently told CNN. “But I think all of us now are thinking about the result and about showing Europe the real character of our country.”

For Ukraine’s talented but scattered side, the tournament offers their beleaguered nation a moment in the sun. They narrowly missed out on qualification for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar but secured a berth via playoffs in March into this summer’s continental tournament. In the last Euros, as the tournament is colloquially called, Ukraine reached the quarterfinals. But that was before the war exploded at home. Their upcoming group games — which also include matches against Belgium and Slovakia — will play to sympathetic crowds across Germany, probably bolstered by huge throngs of fellow Ukrainians in exile.

Ukraine’s stars line up for clubs in Europe’s best leagues, including top teams in Britain, Spain and Italy. But, in recent interviews with reporters, they have all spoken of the plight of their nation and the guilt they shoulder being away from the front lines, where Ukrainian men of their age are losing their lives in resistance to the Russian invasion.

“Every day people die, cities destroyed. Every day when we wake up, we read the news about what the situation is in Ukraine,” Taras Stepanenko, a veteran midfielder and Shakhtar stalwart, told reporters. “Every day, I see on my phone screen, messages about air [raids]. So every morning I phone my parents to ask if everything is okay. We live in this condition almost three years. It’s so difficult.”

The team’s players have used their celebrity and good fortune to raise funds for humanitarian assistance, lead charity projects for the war wounded and drive awareness of the conflict elsewhere in Europe. “We need to talk about it, shout about it every day,” Oleksandr Zinchenko, a versatile defender and midfielder who plays for Arsenal, London’s biggest team, said. “This is the only way we can win.”

That may be all the more true given the gloomy state of the war. Rather than gaining ground on the Russian invaders, Ukraine’s outmanned and outgunned troops are grimly holding the line, in desperate need of more Western arms and materiel. Over the weekend, dozens of world leaders convened in Switzerland for a peace conference organized by Kyiv. Russia and China, a key backer of the Kremlin, were absent, making the deliberations seem chiefly symbolic.

A Russian proposal before the summit’s opening that called for a cease-fire along the current lines and Ukraine’s surrender of four regions was swiftly rejected by Kyiv and its backers, who do not want to normalize or accept Russia’s illegal land grab of swaths of southern and eastern Ukraine.

The deep uncertainty of the moment hangs heavily on Ukraine’s team, whose stars know their own courage and success can help lift the mood of an embattled nation. “Despite frequent claims that sport should be kept separate from politics, Ukraine’s appearance at the European Championship will inevitably help draw international attention to the ongoing Russian invasion of the country,” noted the Atlantic Council’s Mark Temnycky. “The Ukrainian squad will also be acutely aware of their role as ambassadors of a nation that is currently fighting for survival.”

The team itself has had to prepare for the tournament — in which Russia is banned from participation — in unprecedented circumstances. “The most difficult [thing] in our job is adapting to the quickly changing environment affected by the war,” Andriy Shevchenko, head of Ukraine’s main soccer body, told the AFP. “We have to work through many restrictions, including safety requirements, air raids, missiles attacks from Russia, curfews and blackouts. These issues make it harder to function, but we are managing well.”

They know, after all, that the situation for others back home is far worse. “I hope when we play the games,” creative attacker Ruslan Malinovskyi told reporters, “people in Ukraine have lights to watch the games on TV.”