It is unseasonably warm but the leaves cloaking Sviatoshyn Olympic Centre are turning the same hue as Shakhtar Donetsk’s orange shirts. The sky is clear and the two training pitches pristine. A radiant, textured scene tucked away far from the city’s noise feels ideal for conditioning Champions League footballers, especially when they are sandwiched between two encounters with Barcelona. The only reminders that nothing here is ordinary come upon arriving and leaving. At the entrance to the facility, soldiers carry out checks on every vehicle.
The Shakhtar team bus is among those to have made it inside. “Beyond boundaries” reads the italicised white writing on its side. Nobody can put a number on the hours it has spent shuttling Shakhtar to Poland and back since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year. They cannot fly to or from their own country during wartime, so their neighbours provide a gateway to the rest of the world. Less than a week earlier, the bus took them 450 miles from Rzeszow airport after their narrow defeat in Catalonia; in a couple of days it will bring them back there before the return match in Hamburg, where Shakhtar host continental fixtures this season. To earn the riches of a top club, Shakhtar must work harder than anybody.
First they must deal with matters closer to home. It is Thursday and, the following evening, Shakhtar will contest Ukraine’s “Klasychne” against Dynamo Kyiv: the country’s biggest rivalry by a street and, because Shakhtar have been unable to play in Donetsk since 2014, a de facto city derby. They must switch their minds from the hubbub and glamour of European nights to the toughest domestic assignment of all, which officially must take place behind closed doors because of the ongoing threat of Russian missiles.
On that bright green surface, Marino Pusic addresses his players. “Work your asses off, die for each other,” he tells them. “If you bring both energy and quality, your level will only go up.” Shakhtar are objectively better than Dynamo but that means little, especially when their opponents are managed by Mircea Lucescu. It was Lucescu, now 78, who oversaw Shakhtar’s rise to the elite between 2004 and 2016. They were brilliant, fresh, a thorn in every side, and Uefa Cup winners in 2009. There was astonishment when Lucescu, seemingly ready for retirement, opted for a final fling at Dynamo three years ago.
Shakhtar have plenty of long-term staff who know Lucescu perfectly. Watching from the sidelines the assistant director of football Carlo Nicolini, who was Lucescu’s fitness coach, comments that his old boss will emphasise hard running and aggression to compensate for Dynamo’s technical inferiority. Without supporters to whip up fervour, the teams will have to compete in a maelstrom of their own making.
Pusic has been Shakhtar’s head coach for only 10 days. His contract was signed in Barcelona, everything finalised just in time to take training the day before the match. There have not been many opportunities for him or his assistant, the former Chelsea player Mario Stanic, to get their message across but the players are receptive. They disliked the direct tactics and disciplinarian approach of his predecessor, Patrick van Leeuwen. The former assistant to Arne Slot in a marvellous Feyenoord setup, Pusic has his new charges practising fast, sharp moves from the back against a high press.
If he wants to be struck by the situation he has been pitched into, he only has to look at the coaches’ office by the touchline. The Russians shelled this facility during their attack on Kyiv and it still bears the scars. Back then the building’s glass front was shattered by shrapnel and one fragment pierced a photograph of the then-manager Roberto De Zerbi, which was hung above the meeting table, directly in the heart. De Zerbi, who had left the country like so many others, told friends that the brutalised image reflected his feelings.
But, like the Shakhtar director of football Darijo Srna, Pusic and Stanic have their own experience of war. They both had to flee Bosnia when Yugoslavia fell apart. Perhaps their empathy will help a young squad whose resilience defies logic. “Half of you is playing football and half of you is waiting to come back and live his life,” Stanic says. “First you have to understand before you want to be understood,” Pusic remarks. Two nights previously both men were in Kyiv when air raid sirens, comparatively rare nowadays in a city that is giving a passable impression of its vibrant past, pierced any illusions that normality lies around the corner.
‘It’s like we are on a training camp all year’
“I’ve heard people say Shakhtar is like a cloud,” says Vitaliy Khlivnyuk. “You have all the materials and then you move, unload them and load them up again, ready to go.” Khlivnyuk heads up the club’s sport management department: the logistics of carrying players, staff, and resources between temporary homes ultimately rest on him. He remembers how, in the first few years after Russia began its war in Donbas and forced Shakhtar to leave, making hour-long domestic flights from bases in Kharkiv and Lviv would feel onerous. With air travel off the agenda it has nothing on interminable hours of coach travel and, just as problematically, extended waits at the border.
“Last season everyone was exhausted after 12, 13, 14 hours on the bus,” he says. “What I notice now is that they’re mentally prepared: when we arrived in Barcelona I didn’t sense that level of fatigue. They’ve reconciled themselves to the travel time.
“Honestly, I feel that way too. We thought in 2014 that nothing worse could happen to us, but then it happened and happened and happened. We all became stronger and nothing can sway us. You can tell us to play anywhere tomorrow and we will go.”
Khlivnyuk has just helped to finalise a fundraising match in Japan against Avispa Fukuoka for 18 December, five days after they complete their Champions League group‑stage campaign in Porto. It follows other friendlies designed to aid Ukraine’s reconstruction, such as an August match at Spurs that raised £505,000. The trip to Tokyo could, all being well, raise four times as much: their longest journey yet will be no hardship because Shakhtar feel responsible for taking Ukraine on the road.
“It’s like we are on a training camp all year,” Taras Stepanenko, Shakhtar’s talismanic captain, says with a smile. “But it’s easy to keep up the energy. We visit soldiers in hospital and realise how strong these people are. They contribute the most expensive thing you have in your life: their health. And you realise that, as a footballer, you have such a privilege to play outside Ukraine. I have three sons and I’d like them to see their father do something good to protect and help the country. These are the things that motivate me.”
Both men are sitting inside Hotel Opera, a five-star hotel in Kyiv owned by the Shakhtar president, Rinat Akhmetov. It has served as the club’s administrative base since 2014: this and the rudimentary Sviatoshyn are the nearest they possess to permanent abodes.
Khlivnyuk finds a photograph on his phone, taken the day before Russia first attacked Kyiv, showing a planned reconstruction of the training centre that would set down deeper roots in the capital. It has necessarily been put on hold but Shakhtar know they will not be back in Donetsk any time soon.
“Thinking with my heart, I’d be willing to go back tomorrow,” he says. “But I understand it would take time even if the war stopped: we don’t know what we would find there, or how people would receive us. The most annoying thing is that nothing depends on us. My feeling is that it’s not going to be so fast, but I believe it will happen some day.”
There is no option but to remain peripatetic and cope. Stepanenko speaks of how difficult it was, while he was out of the country a month ago, to hear the stadium of his boyhood club Torpedo Zaporizhzhia had been struck by a missile. Heorhiy Sudakov, the 21‑year‑old playmaker who scored in Barcelona and will almost certainly follow Mykhaylo Mudryk in raising vital transfer money for Shakhtar, recounts the horror of discovering last October that Kyiv had been struck several times. His wife and baby daughter had remained in the city. “It was very, very heavy for all of us, impossible not to cry,” Sudakov says. Shakhtar were in Warsaw at the time: the following day, against all rational expectation, they held Real Madrid to a draw.
“The most important thing is not to forget the reality,” Khlivnyuk says. “When you see lights on, cars on the streets, restaurants working, you have the feeling everything is OK. But nothing is OK really.”
A different rivalry in times of war
On his 10th birthday, Andriy grasps the fence posts between his hands and yells: “Dynamo! Dynamo!” A number of the 100 or so supporters who have joined him on this hill, in parkland overlooking Valeriy Lobanovskyi Stadium, chant along with their young cheerleader. Darkness has fallen: the air is still and cold. Down on the turf, where Shakhtar and Dynamo are largely cancelling one another out, the chants sound eerily distant but clear. Covid‑19 and war have given Andriy precious few chances to visit Dynamo’s home but two thirds of the pitch are visible between the iron bars. He stood in the same spot to watch Dynamo beat Vorskla Poltava in September. The next generation of Ukrainian football fans need dedication and ingenuity.
There are, in reality, around 500 spectators in this storied arena’s main stand. They are invited guests of the home side, players’ entourages and in a few cases war veterans. Fifteen months have passed since the league restarted and there is a push from many clubs in Ukraine for stadiums to be officially opened again, perhaps to 30% or 50% of capacity: concerts and other public events are occurring during wartime, after all. But the drain on security resources at such a parlous moment is one reason for the authorities’ reluctance. It means the howl from Heorhiy Bushchan, Dynamo’s keeper, when he is felled by Danylo Sikan peals up to Andriy and his fellow supporters without impediment. Tackles thud in and boots clear balls upfield, all to little more than a hum of comment from the side.
These clubs met here in the semi‑final of that Uefa Cup campaign in 2009 and, by contrast, nobody could hear themselves think. Dmytro Chyhrynskyi, the veteran defender who returned in August for a third stint at Shakhtar, says: “Back then it was: ‘Wow!’ It was a massive moment for Ukrainian football. Everyone had been buzzing for the entire week before. It was one of the most difficult and intense nights of my career.”
Chyhrynskyi scored an own goal but Shakhtar battled back to draw, proceeding to win the home leg and then take the trophy against Werder Bremen. Beating Dynamo with the stakes so high felt, to many, like the bigger prize. Stepanenko remembers how temperatures peaked when, after he kissed Shakhtar’s badge in front of the Dynamo fans, a row brewed that caused ructions in the Ukraine squad ahead of Euro 2016.
“But it’s not like before,” Stepanenko says. “Previously there were arguments and scandals, but I don’t think you have these battles between teams during wartime. It’s still a rivalry but our supporters fight in the same battalions and we are all united for the same thing.” Before the game Chyhrynskyi and the former Dynamo player Oleksandr Aliyev, who has served in the army during the war, embrace beside the pitch.
After it Shakhtar can celebrate, even if modestly. They win through an angled second‑half finish from Oleksandr Zubkov, possibly just outside Andriy’s line of sight, and deserve the points after Pusic cajoles an improvement at the break. But it is Lucescu, ever the showman, who takes the evening’s headlines. Allowed into Shakhtar’s dressing room by his old colleagues, he congratulates Pusic before addressing the squad. “I will never forget my time in Donetsk with this team,” he says to applause. Lucescu then announces he is ending his football career after 44 years in management.
Shakhtar cannot stick around at the retirement party for long: the next day they must hit the road yet again, arriving eventually in Hamburg for Tuesday’s game via a customary pit stop in Lviv. Some of the team will play cards; Sudakov, who has finished the David Beckham documentary on Netflix and says it moved him to tears, will be occupied by a book by the motivational speaker Nick Vujicic; Stepanenko, who recently grappled with Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations during a Champions League trip, plans to continue learning Spanish on Duolingo.
Autumn will become winter and the colours will change, but Shakhtar have found a consistency few could ever envisage. “The support we give each other is one of the most important things for me,” Stepanenko says. “Spending all this time with each other makes us even stronger. It’s why we are in such good condition. That’s the spirit of our team.”
