The national team of Ukraine recently campaigned for solidarity and donations in friendlies like here in Mönchengladbach.
Photo: imago / Vitalii Kliuiev
Anatoly Tymoshchuk was something of a sporting ambassador for his country. The footballer had 144 caps for Ukraine, still a record. After his career, Tymoshchuk moved to St. Petersburg in 2016 and became an assistant coach at Zenit, the favorite club of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Even after the beginning of the Russian war of aggression on Tymoshchuk’s homeland, he did not want to distance himself from Russia. And so the Football Union of Ukraine gave him a lifetime ban from activities in Ukraine.
Tymoshchuk is just one example of the political exclamation marks that have recently been made in Ukrainian football. The national team wants to spread the most important message this week. In two playoff games she still wants to qualify for the World Cup in December 2022 in Qatar. To do that, she has to win in Scotland this Wednesday and then against Wales on Sunday. For the Ukrainians, reaching the global stage would be a sign of confidence, also in contrast to Russia. Both nations share a common football history.
Football has shaped Ukrainian patriotism for generations. That was already the case in the Soviet Union, when Ukraine was on the edge of the multi-ethnic state, but formed the center of football. Between 1961 and 1990, Dynamo Kyiv won the Soviet Championship 13 times. “Many people in Ukraine felt dominated by the center in Moscow,” says Ukrainian historian Kateryna Chernii. »Kyiv was a Russified city, but football shaped a local identity.«
In the USSR, the Kremlin tried to stifle the traditions of the constituent republics. In letters to local newspapers, however, fans from Kyiv sometimes scolded referees from the capital Moscow. A number of letters were written in Ukrainian, which was unusual and unwanted at the time, so they were not allowed to be published.
Football and politics benefited from each other in Kyiv. Dynamo’s successes went back to Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi. The First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine was a football fan. And so coach Valerij Lobanowskyj was able to lead Dynamo to the top with scientific methods. Winning the European Supercup in 1975 against FC Bayern Munich is considered legendary. For the elites in Moscow, this was not a Ukrainian, but a Soviet triumph. They couldn’t get past Lobanowskyj and also appointed him coach of the Soviet national team. There Lobanowskyj let the best players from Kyiv play as a framework for the USSR. “Only in moments of undoubted, convincing success was he recognized and supported by Moscow,” writes the author Yuri Andrukhovych in the anthology Totalniy Futbol. “As soon as he suffered defeat, Moscow ruthlessly and maliciously attacked him.” Lobanowskyj was coach of the USSR three times, twice his engagement lasted only a few months.
At some point, however, the attention was elsewhere, because the world power fell apart. In October 1990, students in Kyiv went on a hunger strike in support of independence. Some Dynamo players hoisted their club flag next to the blue and yellow national flag on the Maidan. They believed that Ukraine would be better off as an independent state, its farms, its crops and also: its sports.
At the beginning of the 1990s there was also a lack of orientation in football. The Soviet Union had qualified for the European Championship in 1992, but then their state ceased to exist. And so the team of the CIS, the »Commonwealth of Independent States« played in Sweden as a transition. This team was also shaped by Ukrainian players, by Oleh Kuznetsov, Andrei Kanchelskis and Sergei Juran. In the meantime, however, they no longer played for Dynamo Kyiv, but in the West, for Glasgow Rangers, Manchester United or Benfica Lisbon. The Soviet model coach Lobanowskyj had escaped the signs of dissolution and had become a coach in the United Arab Emirates.
Russia was allowed to participate in qualifying for the 1994 World Cup. The new Ukrainian team was not allowed to join until qualifying for the 1996 European Championship. “Many Ukrainians felt that this was a great injustice,” says Kateryna Chernii, who researches the transformation of Ukrainian football at the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam. The Ukrainian federation had so little money that they could hardly afford air tickets for the selection team.
In the Soviet Union, many national players came from mixed marriages, their parents came from Georgia, Belarus or Azerbaijan. Fifa gave them the freedom to choose the national teams of the successor states. The prospect of higher bonuses led some Soviet-Ukrainian players to take Russian citizenship, including Juran, who grew up in Luhansk, in eastern Ukraine. A number of Ukrainians then described him as a traitor who had given up his identity.
In the 1990s, influential men in Ukraine divided up the bankruptcy estate of communism. One of them, Grigory Surkis, had worked in the Kyiv housing combine. After independence he invested in oil, banking, agriculture. It is unclear where his money came from. Surkis bought his favorite club Dynamo Kyiv in 1993 and took over as president of the Football Union of Ukraine. He also wanted to get involved in politics, so he made sure that the Dynamos players joined the Social Democratic Party in 1998.
Grigory Surkis and his equally wealthy brother Igor turned football into a tool of the oligarchs. They weren’t the only ones: In the East, the commodity billionaire Rinat Akhmetov led Shakhtar Donetsk to win the Uefa Cup in 2009. Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin confidante who was campaigning for Ukraine’s presidency, also attended the victory celebrations.
Surkis, Akhmetov and Yanukovych wanted to present themselves as statesmen when Ukraine shared the 2012 European Championships with Poland. Five games each took place in Kyiv and Donetsk. The Donbass Arena in Donetsk was built for almost 200 million euros and only opened in 2009. Kateryna Chernii volunteered as a volunteer in Kyiv in 2012. She says: »The Euro gave the Ukrainians a sense of community.«
faded times. The stadium in Donetsk was damaged during the war. In 2015, the Russian Football Association wanted to integrate the professional clubs from Crimea into the Russian game, but Uefa forbade that. Since then, numerous eastern Ukrainian clubs have gone into exile.
Since the beginning of the war of aggression, football has been an even stronger part of propaganda. The Ukraine national team and Dynamo Kyiv have been traveling to Europe for friendlies for weeks. Players solicit solidarity and donations. At the same time, hundreds of hooligans and ultras join the volunteer battalions at the front. Football could give Ukrainians some hope at the moment, says Chernii. Participation in the World Cup in Qatar would be a symbol of sovereignty.
