Stade Rennais faces Ukrainian club Shakhtar Donetsk in the Europa League. A match to be played in Warsaw, outside Ukraine. In the Europa League conference, it is the Dnipro-1 which must deal with the reality of war.
For the second time this season in the Europa League, Stade Rennais is going to Poland to face a club… Ukrainian. Last October, the Breton team went to Krakow to play a match against Dynamo kyiv (1-0). On Thursday February 16, the Rouge et Noir will play in Warsaw, during the first leg of the C3 final phase against Shakhtar Donetsk. The Donbass club, like Dnipro-1, which competes in the Europa League conference, continues its professional activities despite the war in Ukraine.
Shakhtar, club uprooted since 2014
The war in Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022, has been going on for a year soon. The Shakhtar Donetsk club did not wait to learn to live with the consequences of a conflict. The Russian operation in eastern Ukraine in 2014 hit Donbass, the region where the city of Donetsk is located. “This is the second time they [les Russes] try to drive me out of my house. First from the Donetsk region and now the whole country, it’s amazing”told AFP Oleksandr Zubkov, Shakhtar player exempted like all professional athletes from the general mobilization which concerns Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60.
Since 2014, Shakhtar has moved to Lviv, Kharkiv and then kyiv. But it is in Warsaw that the club plays its European Cup matches and played in the Champions League group stage, in which it finished third, before being transferred to the Europa League . Stade Rennais will discover the stadium of Marshal Jozef Pilsudski. It generally hosts the Legia Warsaw which, like all of Poland, has provided considerable assistance to Ukrainian refugees since the beginning of the war.
Faced with Rennes, Shakhtar will play its first official match since November 23, due to the winter break in the Ukrainian championship which will resume at the end of February. After the start of the war, the club from Donetsk saw many foreign players leave, but also the Ukrainian star in the making, Mykhaïlo Mudryk, transferred to Chelsea in January against more than 70 million euros. Shakhtar announced that nearly 23 million euros generated by the operation will be used for the Ukrainian war effort.
“We play for Ukraine”, said Sergei Palkin, the club’s executive director, who clarified to CNN “be very proud of your team (…) after losing half of his team and staff“. Being able to play the Ukrainian league, and its European Cup matches abroad, allows the club to maintain a facade of professionalism. But the reality of war often catches up with Shakhtar players. Like in the morning of the C1 match against Real Madrid in October (1-1), after Russian strikes on Ukrainian territory.”At breakfast all my players were watching the bombing news and all of them were crying“, told Igor Jovicevic, the coach of Shakhtar, At DailyMail.
Dnipro-1, the only Ukrainian club based outside the country
A month ago, on January 14, the Russian bombardment of a building in Dnipro caused the death of 44 civilians, one of the heaviest tolls since the start of the war. Aware that the city, located in eastern Ukraine, would be one of the targets of the Russian invasion, the Dnipro-1 club quickly left their stronghold at the start of the war.
Unlike other teams in the country, he settled outside Ukraine, in Kosice (Slovakia). It is there that Dnipro-1, opposed to AEK Larnaca on Thursday in the first leg of the final phase of the Europa League conference, will receive the Cypriot club on February 23. “In Kosice, it’s exactly as if I were living in France. We train in a brand new stadium, with great equipment. It’s more complicated on the other side, we feel a bit heavy atmosphere”, explained on October 19 to Parisian former Ligue 1 player Fahrès Bahloulinow at Dnipro-1.
For its very first season in the European Cup, the club founded in 2017 has achieved a remarkable course, especially in the current context. “Good news from the front gives us superpowers, if I can put it that way“, explained this week Artem Dovbyk, Dnipro-1 striker, in a UEFA documentary devoted to the C3 and C4.
In the league, Dnipro-1 makes the short trip from Kosice to play its home matches in Ouzhhorod, a Ukrainian city on the Ukrainian-Slovakian border. “At the border between Ukraine and Slovakia, the checks are incredibly long, up to ten or even 12 hours. On the Ukrainian side, it goes quite quickly, but on the Slovak side… The soldiers are there with their Kalash get out of the bus and go through gantries. They pass dogs”, revealed Bahlouli. Like all the other clubs in the country, the Dnipro-1 saw its habits upset by the war. In November, his match against Oleksandriya was interrupted after ten minutes and then postponed, due to Russian airstrikes.
A few days later, the players were able to return to Dnipro to play a league match. They haven’t been there since and prepared for the resumption in southern Turkey for a few weeks, like Shakhtar Donetsk. An unusual situation, which Dovbyk regrets: “I would like the situation to stabilize so that we can get back to our lives before February 24.”
