FC Chakhtar Donetsk is due to play, Thursday, February 23 at 9 p.m., in Rennes in the Europa League, one of the European football cups. An away game then. But that doesn’t make a big difference for the club. For nearly nine years and the start of the Donbass war, this flagship team in the Ukrainian championship has no longer had a fixed address. “We keep moving, moving from one country to another, from one city to another, from one hotel to another., explains Yuri Svyrydov, Chakhtar’s communications director since 2011. We are happy when we have two or three days to find our loved ones. » Football is, in essence, a profession of a mountebank. In Ukraine at war, Donetsk players are just that: wandering sportsmen, but don’t go saying stateless.
“We no longer have a homesums up symbolically Serhi Palkin, 48, the general manager of the club. It is physically and psychologically difficult. » This life of football peddlers has lasted since May 2, 2014 and a match won by Donetsk in its ultramodern 50,000-seat stadium, the Donbass Arena. Then the east of the country sank into a war opposing the national army to the separatists militarily supported by Russia. “We thought it was going to last two or three months and that we would come back”, says Yuri Svyrydov, who was present that day in the stands. The time is getting longer but hope is intact. “I saw pictures of the stadium today, explains Yehor Nazaryna, 25, midfielder who joined the team in 2022 and who has therefore never set foot on this lawn. The area was bombed in 2014, but the Arena appears untouched. She seems to be waiting for us. I hope to play there one day. » The return of Chakhtar to its lair would be one of the tangible and more than symbolic signs of the reconquest of the territorial integrity of Ukraine.
Cruelty of history, on May 2, 2014, the Donetsk team was opposed to that of Mariupol, the martyr city of the current Russian invasion. One of the first acts of the Russian occupiers when they took the port city in May 2022 was to dissolve the football club, considered to be a potential ferment of protest. There wasn’t a stone left of the stadium anyway. The Mariupol club could in turn become a club without an address, as Chakhtar Donetsk and its neighbor Zorya Luhansk have been for so many years, a city that also fell under the control of pro-Russian separatists in 2014.
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