Just playing is a small victory for Shakhtar Donetsk, though the Ukrainian champions won't stop there.
Team captain Taras Stepanenko said on Monday that Shakhtar's opening Champions League game against Porto on Tuesday is part of his team's duty to represent Ukraine and show his country's resilience.
“Our soldiers fight in the battles and we fight in the sports arena. So it's our duty like citizens of Ukraine,” he said.
Stepanenko predicts “big emotions” when Shakhtar emerges in front of tens of thousands of fans, both local and Ukrainian, in Hamburg. The Ukrainian league restarted a year ago despite the war but all games are played in empty stadiums — and sometimes interrupted by air-raid sirens.
For the second straight season, Shakhtar are playing their Champions League games outside Ukraine because of the Russian invasion. Last year, Poland stood in as Shakhtar's home venue. Now it's Germany, a country that has welcomed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who fled the fighting.
Just getting to Hamburg took an “absolutely difficult” 10-hour journey, Stepanenko said, mostly by bus because Ukraine's airports have been closed since the invasion. After winning a Ukrainian league game on Saturday, the team drove to Poland from the border city of Lviv, spent about three hours getting through the border, then caught a flight from Poland to Hamburg. It's technically a home game for Shakhtar, but the away team will get there much faster from Portugal.
“You never know what's going to happen at the borders. Even with the domestic league, there's a lot of traveling involved for away games. Hours in the bus is a regular thing at the moment," Shakhtar coach Patrick van Leeuwen said.
Besides the usual fan mail, players get messages from Ukrainian troops on the front line. Stepanenko said it's a reminder of how his situation compares to the hardship they face, and extra motivation to give his all on the field.
“When we drew with England (in a national team game on September 9), I really got a lot of messages from the soldiers. They watched the game on the battlefield near the area where it's the most difficult situation now. For them it's like a release from the current situation,” he said. “You play football and these guys are supporting you during the war.”
The town where Stepanenko was born, Velyka Novosilka, is in Ukraine-held territory near the front line of the country's recent counter-offensive. It has been “totally destroyed,” he said. Stepanenko's mother and grandmother have moved in with him from Zaporizhzhia, a frequent target of Russian strikes.
“My grandmother every day gets in touch with her sister who lives in Novosilka until now, in the basement,” he said. “It's not a big city, but it's totally destroyed. And the nearest village is just the same. And the nearest village is just the same. I think maybe 10 per cent of the people are still living there because maybe they don't want to leave. This is hell.”
