It is a long journey that the Ukrainian champions Shakhtar Donetsk had to undertake in order to play the opening game of the group phase of the Champions League against Porto this Tuesday (9 p.m. in the FAZ live ticker for the Champions League and on DAZN) in Hamburg. Because the airspace over Ukraine is closed due to the Russian war of aggression, Dutch coach Patrick van Leeuwen and his players had to take the bus from Lviv to Rzeszow, Poland.
Then we took a plane to Northern Germany. In Lviv, Shakhtar, who fled the embattled Donbass region in 2014 and have since settled in Kiev for games, played the league game against Obolon (1-0) – a club from the capital – on Saturday for logistical reasons.
