Darijo Srna has lived through three wars, and in the latest cheapening of human life he helped to organise 100 children's evacuation from Ukraine.
The kids – from the academy at Shakhtar Donetsk, where Srna is director of football – are now safe in the Croatian resort of Split, many of them with their mothers, after being rescued from Russian bombs and missiles.
All this after his exhausting, and dangerous, 36-hour car journey to escape besieged Kyiv and reach his homeland. Srna's motives for his humanitarian mercy mission are simple: Life is precious, and football must always prevail over war. “This is the third war I have been through in my lifetime – Croatia in 1991, then in 2014 when the Russians chased Shakhtar out of Donetsk, and now they go to war in all of Ukraine so we have to leave Kyiv.
