Ukrainian football team prepares for European Championships amid internal war

Shakhtar hasn’t played a single match at the Donbas Arena in a decade. The 2014 Russian insurgency in eastern Ukraine saw pro-Kremlin forces seize Donetsk and drive their best teams to Lviv in western Ukraine. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Shakhtar’s existence has become even more nomadic: the club has “hosted” European opponents at stadiums in Poland and Germany.

The Donbass Arena is nothing more than an abandoned husk of what it once was, damaged by war and lost behind enemy lines. Ukrainian forces released footage of a reconnaissance drone they flew over Donetsk in February, flying over the abandoned stadium that was once the theater of Ukrainian dreams, the place where President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a speech to the Russian invaders in 2022, said he had “rooted with the locals for our Ukrainians” a decade before.

But Ukrainian football has hardly taken a step back. Shakhtar Donetsk still stands out on the European scene. And on Monday, the Ukrainian national team will play its first match at this year’s European Championships. This match, a group stage match against Romania in Munich, is one that Ukraine’s most prized team will hope to win. But the stakes are much higher than the three points to be won.

“Before (the war), when you fight on the field, you only think about the result,” Ukrainian head coach Sergiy Rebrov recently told CNN. “But I think we are all now thinking about the outcome and the need to show Europe the true character of our country.”

For Ukraine’s talented but scattered team, the tournament offers its beleaguered nation a moment in the sun. They narrowly missed qualifying for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, but secured a place via the playoffs in March for this summer’s continental tournament. During the last Euro, as the tournament is colloquially called, Ukraine reached the quarter-finals. But that was before the war broke out in our country. Their next group matches – which also include matches against Belgium and Slovakia – will be played in front of sympathetic crowds across Germany, likely supported by huge crowds of fellow Ukrainians in exile.

Ukrainian stars line up for clubs in Europe’s top leagues, including top teams from Britain, Spain and Italy. But in recent interviews with journalists, they all spoke about the fate of their nation and the guilt they bear for being far from the front lines, where Ukrainian men their age are losing their lives resisting the Russian invasion.

“Every day, people die, cities are destroyed. Every day when we wake up we read the news about the situation in Ukraine,” veteran midfielder and Shakhtar mainstay Taras Stepanenko told reporters. “Every day I see messages on my phone screen about air raids. So every morning, I call my parents to ask them if everything is okay. We have lived in this state for almost three years. It’s so difficult.”

The team’s players used their fame and luck to raise money for humanitarian aid, carry out charitable projects for the war wounded, and raise awareness of the conflict elsewhere in Europe. “We have to talk about it, shout it every day,” said Oleksandr Zinchenko, a versatile defender and midfielder who plays for Arsenal, London’s biggest team. “It’s the only way we can win.”

This is perhaps even more true given the grim state of the war. Rather than gaining ground on the Russian invaders, the undermanned and outgunned Ukrainian troops are gloomily holding the line, in desperate need of more Western weapons and equipment. Over the weekend, dozens of world leaders gathered in Switzerland for a peace conference hosted by kyiv. Russia and China, a key backer of the Kremlin, were absent, making the deliberations largely symbolic.

A Russian proposal before the summit opened that called for a ceasefire along current lines and the surrender of four regions by Ukraine was quickly rejected by kyiv and its supporters, who are unwilling to normalize or accept Russia’s illegal land grab on swaths of the South and South. eastern Ukraine.

The deep uncertainty of the moment weighs heavily on the Ukrainian team, whose stars know their courage and success can help lift the morale of a struggling nation. “Despite frequent claims that sport should be separated from politics, Ukraine’s participation in the European Championship will inevitably help to focus international attention on the ongoing Russian invasion of the country,” noted Mark Temnycky of the Atlantic Council. “The Ukrainian team will also be keenly aware of their role as ambassadors of a nation currently struggling for survival.”

The team itself had to prepare for the tournament – ​​in which Russia is banned from participating – under unprecedented circumstances. “The most difficult part of our work is adapting to a rapidly changing environment affected by the war,” Andriy Shevchenko, president of Ukraine’s main football federation, told AFP. “We face many restrictions, including security requirements, air raids, Russian missile attacks, curfews and power cuts. These issues make it more difficult for us to operate, but we are doing well.

After all, they know that the situation of others at home is much worse. “I hope that when we play the matches,” creative striker Ruslan Malinovskyi told reporters, “people in Ukraine will have lights to watch the matches on TV.”