Inside the windowless conference room of the Kyiv hotel where the soccer stars had gathered, the anxiety was growing by the minute. An aborted attempt to flee had been a disaster. And the sounds of war — mortar fire, rocket blasts, screeching warplanes — provided a near constant reminder of their precarious circumstances.

By Saturday morning the group, made up mostly of Brazilians but now swelled by other South Americans and Italians, numbered as many as 70. The players had come to Ukraine to play soccer; weeks earlier, they had taken the field in Champions League, Europe’s richest competition. Now, with their season suspended and Russian forces advancing on the city, they were huddled with their families — wives, partners, young children, aging relatives — and plotting how, and when, to make a run for their lives.

“I hope everything will be OK,” one of the stranded Brazilian players, Junior Moraes, said Saturday morning. Moraes, a forward for the Ukrainian club Shakhtar Donetsk, explained how the group had been hustled to the hotel last week by their team. In the days that followed, as first the country and then the city had come under attack, their ranks expanded after foreign players from a rival club, Dynamo Kyiv, asked to join them.

Fearing for their safety and their families’, the players had released a short video that quickly went viral. Food was in short supply, the players said. Necessities like diapers had already run out.

Plans to evacuate were hatched and then quickly scrapped. Flights were impossible; Ukraine had shut down civilian aviation, and Russian forces were attacking the airport.

Gasoline was in short supply, and a group now numbering in the dozens knew it would be nearly impossible to arrange enough cars, or stay together amid the chaos.

Making a run for it carried its own risks, too, since it would have required surrendering their connection with the outside world. The hotel at least had a supply of electricity and, just as crucially, a reliable internet connection, Moraes said.

In frantic phone calls, he and others in the group, which included Shakhtar’s coach, Roberto De Zerbi, an Italian, had made contact with consular officials and governments back home. Empathy was abundant. Solutions were not.

The players and their families were advised to try to make it to the train station in Kyiv and join the throngs heading west toward Lviv, a city in western Ukraine, closer to the Polish border, that had become a focal point for the exodus from the Russian advance.

Salvation, in the end, came not from political connections but local ones: Officials from Ukraine’s soccer federation had procured two buses and sent them to the hotel in Kyiv.

Calls were placed to the players. Hurry, they were told. Gather your belongings and your families and be prepared to move quickly.

The buses rolled up, the athletes and their families scrambled aboard, and the group was quickly ferried to one of the city’s train stations.

Milling on the packed platform, the athletes, who in other circumstances might have been recognised and greeted as local superstars, glanced around nervously. On Saturday, theirs were just a few more among a sea of anxious faces.

Then, at 4:50 p.m. local time, the locomotive they had boarded gave a short jerk and set off west toward Romania, toward safety, away from war.

(New York Times News Service)