Celtic Park in Glasgow is among the most partisan football grounds in Europe – you don’t want to be on the wrong end of this crowd. But Celtic fans know the world, and last September was different: home supporters lined the approach to the stadium, to greet and applaud the visitors’ coach as it arrived for a big night in the Champions League. Aboard it: Shakhtar Donetsk, the Ukrainian champions who had not played a game at home for nine years, since Russian separatists and armed forces occupied their city in 2014.
The crowd cheered the bus, and – poignantly – among the home fans’ Irish tricolours were flags of blue and yellow, those of Ukraine, waved by a group of children – refugees from the war that ravages their homeland, now settled in Glasgow.
Among them were two sisters from north-eastern Ukraine, Bohdana and Nevena, whose village of Balakliia was overrun by Russian forces early in the present war. Their road here had been a hard one, but that night their smiles were radiant: “I love these boys,” said Nevena, “I wonder whether I’ll see my home again – but when Shakhtar play, we are all like back there together.”
In wartime, Shakhtar has become a standard-bearer beyond the team’s illustrious history and prowess on the pitch wherever they play, but also for the country they have come to represent – its noble cause and just war. Shakhtar is now Ukraine FC, and Refugee FC, even in their own land.
And now their fans are refugees, too, both within the Ukrainian Premier League, which defiantly proceeds, or scattered across the diaspora, to watch Shakhtar compete at the apex of European football.
Domestic league matches are now played in empty stadiums for security reasons. Since the Russians occupied Donetsk, along with much of Donbas and Crimea, the club has been based in Lviv, Kharkiv and currently at the stadium of its bitter rival, Dynamo Kyiv.
Shakhtar’s home in European competitions is Warsaw, where last week they faced Rennes in a Europa League knockout first leg, on a cold night at Legia stadium. Shakhtar won 2-1, an early goal by Kryskiv, then Bondarenko from the penalty spot on half-time. Their fans, around three sides of the ground, sung the team’s name but waved the national flag, chanting: “Uk-ra-ina!” at volume. Before the game, Shakhtar’s Croatian manager, Igor Jovićević, told me: “It’s a cocktail of emotions, and I have to channel them into our tactics and strategic plan.” It works, as the victory established. “Without fear,” says Jovićević, “you cannot have courage.”
At the team’s hotel (which happens to be next door to Russia’s embassy to Poland), the Kalimbet brothers – Nikita, 8, and Alya, 11 – sit in the lobby with their grandmother Olga. The family comes from Popasna, near Russian-occupied Luhansk. The boys wear puckish smiles today, but are orphans: their parents were killed last spring as Russian forces reduced their town to “a place that no longer exists”, explains Olga. The three survivors escaped to government-held Dnipropetrovsk, whence they were brought to Warsaw last week as guests of honour by the Shakhtar Social – the club’s charitable foundation. Many came before them, and many more will follow. “It means everything,” says Olga, “their happiest days for a long time.”
The foundation director, Inna Khmyzova, arranges for the family to watch, pitch-side, while the team trains the night before the Rennes game, in an empty stadium, under the floodlights. “They’re here for a few days,” says Khmyzova, “but I expect they’ll stay. Especially if Bakhmut falls to the Russians [scene of ferocious current fighting, 20 miles west of Popasna]. At the pre-match press conference, Jovićević namechecked the lads, with a smile: “We’re going to play extra hard for those two boys we met today.”
Jovićević is the propulsion behind Shakhtar’s remarkable achievement, playing football at this level during a monstrous war. He was born in Zagreb, and joined Real Madrid’s books during Croatia’s war of independence in 1991, before moving to Ukraine to play for and manage Karpaty Lviv, then Shakhtar.
I had asked him after the game at Celtic Park how it feels to play for the hearts of 40 million people: “It’s a big responsibility, a big emotion,” he replied. “Because we know that 40 million people, 10 million outside Ukraine, are supporting us. We are motivated to show the same fight as the soldiers show when they are fighting for us. And it makes us stronger as a team.
Having reported Croatia’s war of independence against Russian-backed Serbia in 1991, I asked Jovićević if it mattered that his country went through something similar 30 years ago. “Yes, of course. That’s why I can say: you stay more resistant, you fight to the end. And that emotion helps in other spheres, like in sport. Croatia was a champion in some sports, but after the war, it proved mentally strong to have suffered, to know suffering, and a belief to win.”
He continued: “It’s not easy. Because at the same time that we’re thinking about politics and bombs, I must prepare for matches in the Champions League. Three days ago [in Kyiv], we didn’t finish training because the siren started, and we must stay in the hotel shelter. That’s the reality in this moment. They are heroes, the football players are heroes, really – they make us proud of the whole country.”
Now, in conversation before this week’s match, Jovićević ponders: “At Barcelona, it says in the stands: “Més que un club” – more than a club. We are that, too – a hundred times more. I wonder whether any other club could have suffered and survived what we have. There’s nothing in the academy to teach what we are doing, nothing you can learn from books.”
He contrasts the circumstances under which his players and their opponents prepare for these major encounters. Before Shakhtar’s last match here, against Leipzig in the Champions League, “we’d played a game a few days earlier which lasted four and a half hours, between kick-off and final whistle, because of air raid sirens; we had to keep interrupting the game to go to the shelter. That’s just not football.”
Shakhtar lost 4-0 to the Germans, yet PA announcements beforehand urged, in Polish: “Victory to your soldiers! Glory to Ukraine!” It was a cold, foggy night through which the fans, Ukrainian refugees from all over, chanted for their doomed side throughout. I met a trio of lads from Kyiv, one on crutches, injured during the war – Dynamo fans, “but just for tonight, we’re for Shakhtar, for Ukraine. Ssh! No photos please!”
Donetsk is an industrial centre with a strong history of coalmining and ironworks; Shakhtar means “miner”. The city was founded by a Welshman, John James Hughes, commissioned by imperial Russia in 1870 to establish a metalworks. The city was originally named after him: Yuzovka. He donated a hospital, schools, bath houses and tea rooms. In 1924, it was renamed Stalino, then, finally Donetsk in 1961.
The football club was founded in 1936, and by the end of the 2013-14 season, Shakhtar had everything to celebrate. In 2009, they had lifted the last Uefa Cup, before it was rebranded as the Europa League. In 2012, Ukraine had co-hosted (with Poland) the successful 2012 Uefa Euro tournament; Shakhtar’s state-of-the-art Donbass Arena, completed in 2009, was a prestige venue. In spring 2014, Shakhtar had won their fifth successive Ukrainian championship.
Then pro-Russian separatists seized the city, and the invader stormed across the border. The stadium was among many buildings damaged by bombing.
Taras Stepanenko, Shakhtar’s captain and anchor, vividly remembers “that day: 25 May 2014. Strange soldiers with balaclavas and no insignia taking over the streets. That day was my first wedding anniversary – but my wife was scared, and we left with my son, to Zaporizhzhia. Of course, there is this constant sadness – I lost my house and have not seen my home for nine years. It’s a weight on my shoulders – but I have to cope with it, and go with it.”
Stepanenko, a devout Christian, speaks with disarming honesty about how he mentors the younger players. “We’re an entirely different team since this war started. I have to be a leader to mostly young Ukrainians, after losing almost all foreign players from the squad [striker Lassina Traouré from Burkina Faso and Brazilian defender Lucas Taylor remain]. “They are the age of my younger brothers. And we are like a family here – in the same situation: my wife and son are in Spain, all my relatives are in Ukraine.”
“We’re all refugees,” affirms Jovićević, “my wife is in Zagreb, I don’t have an apartment, and a hotel is not home”. Later, he is joined by family in the Warsaw hotel.
One of Shakhtar’s regular fans “at home” in Warsaw is Polina Minenko – duty manager at the Nobu hotel in the Polish capital – whose story and passion speaks for the essence of what Shakhtar Donetsk means. Minenko moved to Donetsk aged three, from the nearby town of Selydove. “We lived right by the Donbass Arena, and I knew the players on the street, waving and saying, ‘hi’.”
When Minenko turned 16, “masked strangers took over the city with their guns. Fighter planes flying low – terrifying.” She fled to Kyiv with her mother, “with summer clothes in a cabin-sized case”. Minenko learned English in Liverpool – “I used to write ‘Donetsk’ in the sand by the seaside” – before settling in Warsaw. Just before Christmas, her grandfather, who had refused to leave Selydove despite relentless bombardment and fighting, relented, and the family met him at the Polish border. “We lost everything,” says Minenko, “and maybe we can never return. But when we watch Shakhtar, it’s like we are all back there, home together again.”
Shakhtar is, proudly, a team from and of the mostly Russian-speaking east, and that remains its identity in exile. Like Minenko in Warsaw, the club’s marketing director, Yuriy Sviridov, from Luhansk, talks at the Opera hotel in Kyiv about how refugees from Donetsk were not immediately welcome here, and in the west of the country, as internal refugees in 2014.
But the present war changes everything: “This war has taught us all what it means to be Ukrainian,” says Stepanenko. “I have never seen my country so cohesive, I’ve never known Ukraine like this. And these emotions are in every game, out there on the pitch. We play to win, for club and colours, but now we also play for everyone in our country.”
Stepanenko poses with Ilya and Nikita Krasimbet, with their new orange team shirts, and recalls the time he “visited a home for orphans in Málaga, when we had a team camp there. What those children have seen is unthinkable, and we want to be an inspiration to them; just let’s make those children happy, and enjoy their life while we play. We play to make them smile.”
• This article was amended on 19 February 2023 to correct the spelling of Polina Minenko’s surname.
