Brdo smells of spring. The air drifting down from the Slovenian Alps feels fresh and clean, the stillness interrupted only by birdsong and distant church bells. Dmytro Riznyk looks across at three immaculate pitches; directly behind him a small stand has been ingeniously embedded in a bright, grassy mound. Football environments rarely get more idyllic but, for those working here this week, the beauty is drowned out by a constant, silent scream.
“I’ll only find peace again when I return to my country and there is no war there,” says Riznyk, one of four goalkeepers in the initial phase of Ukraine’s first training camp since it was invaded. “We are here and my heart is there. We believe in the people who are defending it and believe we will win. When that happens, the fear will go away.”
Still, Riznyk was ready when the time came to travel. He spent the first four days of the war at a maternity ward in Poltava, where he plays for Vorskla, with his wife and newborn son. It was the heaviest of wrenches to leave them, but on 30 April he joined the national team’s staff on a 20-hour bus journey from Kyiv to their bucolic new base.
Most of his 22 colleagues are from Dynamo Kyiv and Shakhtar Donetsk; they have been playing charity matches abroad and could fly to Slovenia but Riznyk is a rarity. Other clubs more or less suspended operations so he has spent almost two months training alone, between trips to the bomb shelter and the haunting wail of sirens, in preparation for a crack at the World Cup. “We hope to honour our country, and also that we can bring joy to our people,” he says.
If Ukraine beat Scotland in next month’s playoff semi-final they will face Wales; win both and a place in Qatar will be secured. In a tournament contested under a shadow, their presence would represent a beam of light. “I’m not putting pressure on them, it’s very difficult,” says the head coach, Oleksandr Petrakov. “I never expected to work under such conditions.”
Petrakov is 64 and thought he had seen everything. In contrast to Riznyk he says a feeling of calm enveloped him as the bus crossed Ukraine’s border with Hungary: there were no snaking, futile queues at petrol stations for dwindling supplies of fuel and he sensed “the kind of life I’d maybe forgotten”.
Imbuing his players with some measure of serenity while conditioning them physically for two intense qualifiers from what is essentially a standing start will, he admits, be the toughest challenge of his career. “I try to joke, to tell them some interesting stories from football and life, to raise their spirits,” he says.
Petrakov speaks with dry humour but an hour spent watching Ukraine train – in a gentle session shortly after their Dynamo contingent has arrived – confirms a tactility, a lightness, in his interactions. “It’s important to distract them from bad thoughts but on the other hand we all know people are dying for Ukraine. They have to keep it in their minds and hearts, as the whole country is waiting for some happiness. We have to put it together for them.”
Petrakov worries his players have not been able to go “full gas”, as he puts it, in their friendlies and knows time to attain a competitive tempo is short. Their foreign-based players, including Oleksandr Zinchenko and Andriy Yarmolenko, should be closer to speed and will arrive later in May; Ukraine play a friendly against Borussia Mönchengladbach on Wednesday but require a couple of more exacting tests before walking out at Hampden Park. The timing is difficult but they hope to face at least one African national team before the month ends.
Any benefits of football might appear nebulous at best while the horror on the ground remains so real. So it is striking to hear the veteran midfielder Taras Stepanenko, talking in a pastel-white room overlooking the training complex, explaining the squad receive messages from soldiers on the frontline every day. “They make only one demand: ‘Please do everything you can to go to the World Cup,’” he says. “For the country, for them, it’s a moment of hope and it will be like a celebration. That’s why we have to play not only like a football game; we have to play with our souls, our hearts.”
Perhaps this, in fact, is sport at its purest: Russia has hardly concealed its intention to erase Ukrainian culture and a football team is one obvious representation of a country’s heart, its craft, its creativity. Playing football on the highest stage is a show of defiance on one level but, on another, an act of preservation and perpetuation.
That thought rears up again during a conversation with Serhiy Sydorchuk, the Dynamo midfielder who, at 31 and with 47 caps, is another senior figure in a youthful group. He sits on a terrace outside the team’s hotel, yards from a reconstruction of a traditional local house on wooden stilts.
Sydorchuk played in his club’s charity games and there is a different image he cannot get out of his head. Before Dynamo played Legia Warsaw in the Polish capital last month, they visited a factory that had been repurposed to accommodate Ukrainian refugees. The players gave toys and sweets to children who had fled with their mothers or grandparents: one was a seven-year-old boy who had been drawing and, pulling up the photo gallery on his phone, Sydorchuk shows the image that was presented.
The scene is heartbreaking: the boy’s drawing, chillingly bright and vivid, depicted a burning set of houses with a Russian flag flying above them. “It’s tough to see, very tough,” Sydorchuk says. “I hope in future he will live his life normally and have everything he wants. But I think a broken or scarred heart will remain.” Qualifying for the World Cup might at least inspire happier means of self-expression.
Given the freedom to travel, Ukraine’s footballers are in a favourable situation – “When you see people who lost everything, and you have something, it’s a very shocking moment,” Sydorchuk says – but the Dynamo and Shakhtar players have still known the practical consequences of Russia’s violence.
In the invasion’s early days he and his family, including his then pregnant wife, spent two days and nights under blankets in the car park beneath their home. His international teammates Serhiy Kryvtsov, Andriy Pyatov and Mykola Matvienko joined them. The nearby airport at Zhuliany had been bombed and the reverberations made their apartment’s window handles fall off. Others have suffered more severely but, as he scrolls through his archive again to show his children sleeping in an open car boot, the point is reinforced that everyone here carries their own trauma with them. “This isn’t only a training camp,” he says. “Everything is different now. It’s very heavy feeling.”
There is raw anger, too, beneath the professionalism and the methodical way Ukraine’s travelling party describe their experiences. Petrakov expresses it strongest of all: perhaps he feels the most able to. He wants to see Russia punished more severely in a sporting sense, beyond their expulsion from the World Cup and the season-long ban from Europe for their club sides.
“They should be banned five years, minimum,” he says. “They have to pay for their support of Putin. They’re killing our women, our children, destroying our cities, so they have no right to compete in sport. If we don’t stop their aggression, they will come for other parts of Europe. It’s not a peaceful nation so, in sport, they should pay for it.”
Riznyk speaks about the help his Vorskla teammates, who are now back in group training, have been giving to hospitals and refugees as volunteers; Sydorchuk describes how his parents and in-laws in Zaporizhzhia, the first relatively safe destination for those who have managed to escape Mariupol, have been giving new arrivals food. The energy and love expended to keep all facets of a country alive defy comprehension.
“We’re all united in this,” Sydorchuk says. “If you’re a journalist, do your journalism work. If you’re a football player, play football for your country. If you’re a normal worker, you can work. Because we have a professional army, we have military volunteers who can fight. But everybody is together, and that’s a very important thing.”
The message is, in the worst of circumstances, simply to be the best you can. For the Ukrainians in Slovenia, whose training is conducted in front of hoardings advertising Lvivske beer and other products from home, that means carrying the torch all the way to Doha. “We need to win our games, but I’m thinking about it,” admits Ryznik, even if he faces a battle to make the final cut.
As night falls and the midges outside offer a reminder that the time of year brings its minor inconveniences, Petrakov wonders whether the mission he never sought has become his destiny. “I’m at such an age where I don’t want anything: no house, no car,” he says. “But if I take the team to Qatar, I have lived my life for a reason.”
