Far away, at the other end of the pitch, a Ukrainian footballer is scoring what later turns out to have been a beautifully worked goal. That is something remarkable in itself but Oksana is talking and the backdrop has become a detail. She is thinking about the train she will board in around nine hours; it will return her to Kyiv, at last, and from there she will join the volunteer effort in Bucha. The home she left is 10 miles further south, in Boyarka. Like most of the capital’s satellite towns, it has undergone its own visit to hell.
“Tomorrow they are burying one more of my friends, but I won’t make it in time,” she says. “Many have gone already and I have no idea whether I will ever see many more of them again. Two close friends were killed while they were helping to evacuate people. They were found in a mass grave with evidence that they were tortured. And I know that there is more of this to come.”
Oksana’s story drowns out the clamour of a football game. It is delivered matter-of-factly and with what she describes as a necessary distance. “My mind is just trying to reject the reality,” she says. “I just disconnect my feelings. It’s going to come later, I’m aware.”
She has wrapped herself in a Ukraine flag and is far from alone in that. At a safe estimate about two-thirds of an 18,000 crowd inside Legia Warsaw’s stadium are her compatriots. Some live here; many have arrived through necessity. All of them are processing, or will one day be faced with handling, grief that is at once collective and intensely personal. They are nominally here to watch Dynamo Kyiv play the host club in the first of a “match for peace” series that will raise money for the response to Russia’s invasion and see them face several other European teams.
To some, immersion in a match represents welcome diversion; to others it is simply the first opportunity to be together in numbers like this. “Maybe not everybody would understand this kind of event but it helps to raise the feeling of belonging to the Ukrainian nation,” says Oksana, who left Boyarka for Warsaw with her children after the war began but has made regular journeys to and from Lviv with supplies for soldiers and medics. “We are fighting a war between light and darkness, and light will succeed.”
It is a yellow and blue collage of thoughts and feelings. Two hours before kick-off Mykola, a Dynamo fan, is standing by a railing at the ground’s north-eastern corner. He is 21 and has been in Warsaw since moving from the central Ukrainian region Kirovohrad, currently working as a barman. As people pass, he helps to staff a makeshift stall accepting donations that will go towards bulletproof vests, helmets and other protective equipment for those defending Ukraine. A similar collection in Warsaw’s old town raised 8,000 zloty (£1,430); that tally will be comfortably exceeded this evening. His father is with him, handing out bread with sliced pork and pickles to everyone who contributes, but he thinks about his grandparents back home.
“It’s an emotional feeling to be here,” he says. “The message Dynamo are sending is important: stop the war, win it and return to peace. That is all we want. This match can help us.”
Outside the stand Katya is with her sister Nastya and brother-in-law Ihor, who have lived in Warsaw for five years. Ihor is a self-confessed Dynamo fanatic and holds a scarf aloft. Katya studies in Kyiv but left early in March to join them, at her family’s insistence. “I feel safe in Warsaw but can’t say I am calm,” she says. “I worry about my parents; it tears me apart. Every night, in my dreams, I just see bombs and people dying.”
Further along, Yulia is pacing up and down a swelling crowd with a clipboard. Every few seconds someone presents her with their blue Ukrainian passport and has their name ticked off a list of participants in a pre-match concert. The vast majority of refugees in Poland are women and children, because most men under 60 are required to stay in Ukraine. Nowadays they are mainly from the country’s east and arrive at Warsaw’s central station, where two tents offering food and other assistance greet them. Yulia, a refugee and a student producer in Kyiv before the invasion, is gathering around 100 of them to join famous Ukrainian musicians on the pitch.
“We set up a Telegram channel to find people who would be interested in coming,” she explains. “It is a way for them to be part of something, and also to help our nation. I’ve been trying to help people with their basic needs since I got here because we all have to be together. But everything is difficult. I feel pain constantly and cry every day.”
The participants file inside, walk around the pitch and, half an hour before kick-off, are dancing on a Ukraine-shaped stage in the centre circle alongside musicians such as Kateryna Pavlenko of Go_A, who represented the country at Eurovision in 2020. The moment when the Ukrainian anthem plays, shortly after the teams have walked out, makes the hair stand on end.
Dynamo have been staying in the Regent hotel, a pleasant walk away through Lazienki Park. Friends drop by to visit, including fellow footballers; Ihor Litovka, goalkeeper from the top-flight club Desna Chernihiv and now a temporary resident in Warsaw with his wife and new-born baby, catches up with the defender Oleksandr Karavayev. Litovka’s home stadium has been bombed; he dreams of returning to Chernihiv, whose scale of suffering is yet to become fully apparent, after the war to rebuild his club and set up a goalkeepers’ academy.
Since leaving Ukraine the Dynamo players have spent 10 days training in Bucharest under the veteran coach Mircea Lucescu, who has spoken passionately about his belief that football can offer empowerment during war. Those players with rooms at the front of the hotel can look out of their windows to see a banner reading “Putin go fuck yourself” in Ukrainian and “Glory to Ukraine” in Polish, hanging from a grey commercial building across the street.
When Vitaliy Buyalskiy puts Dynamo ahead against Legia within three minutes, chipping in adeptly, he does so in front of a “Stop the War” banner emblazoned on the lower tier behind the goal. Buyalskiy drops to his knees; there are loud cheers but otherwise the atmosphere takes time to warm up. This is no ordinary football crowd and it is hardly a night for celebrations; a section of Legia’s ultras have decided to boycott the fixture, alleging that Dynamo’s ownership is pro-Russia, which has been denied. Those fans are not around to present the kind of spectacle they did in Poznan on Saturday, when an image of Putin with a noose around his neck was unfurled. This is a more gentle and sensitive affair but, by the second half, chants denouncing the Russian president become audible and a couple of yellow and blue flares are let off.
“I’m not a fan of Dynamo, just a fan of Ukraine,” says Bohdan, who arrived in Warsaw from the Luhansk region in 2014 and greets the goals enthusiastically. Legia equalise but Dynamo score again through Artem Besedin and, while Oksana is putting everything in its context, the same player seals the outcome by making it 3-1. At full time the song Imagine is played, the flags wave in unison and Benjamin Verbic, a Slovenian winger who joined Legia on loan from Dynamo after the invasion, is among those who cannot hold back the tears.
“We will be dealing with this war for many years,” says Oksana. “But my view, and I don’t think it’s just a romantic one, is that there are much more powerful tools than firing weapons. There is the human face, the brain, the soul and love inside. I think this is what the Ukrainians have and the Russians don’t. We’ve seen it here again tonight. And that’s why we are going to win.”
