Shakhtar Donetsk (Soccer Team)

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    Andriy Shevchenko and Ukraine Wait for a Tomorrow They Can’t See

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    Soccer is not a priority in Ukraine, nor should it be. But the country’s greatest player says it still has a vital role to play in his nation’s sense if itself.There are certain things Andriy Shevchenko cannot talk about. The feeling generated by the wailing of an air-raid siren. The dread instilled by learning just how many missiles had been aimed the previous night at you, your loved ones, your home. The sensation of knowing another swarm of drones is on its way, the only hope that each one can be shot from the sky.Shevchenko does not want to repeat all he has heard from the Ukrainian soldiers posted to the battlefield, that rift that runs through places that were once nearby and familiar but are now alien, part of a terrifying front line. He starts and stops, swallowing hard, unable to go on. “I don’t want to speak about what is going on,” he said.One of the stories he cannot quite bring himself to tell comes from Irpin, a city on the northwestern edge of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, that was the scene of some of the bloodiest, most intense fighting in the early days of the war. Its streets were pounded by airstrikes. A mass grave was found in neighboring Bucha.When Ukrainian forces, after a monthlong counteroffensive, reclaimed control of the city, they found it scarred beyond recognition. Some estimates had it that 70 percent of its structures had been destroyed or damaged. Among them was the city’s soccer stadium.A few months later, Shevchenko went to visit. As he walked around the fractured shell of the place — the artificial-turf field pockmarked with the scars of war, the ramshackle stands charred black — he saw a group of children playing soccer, doing their best to stage a game despite the ruin all around them, and at least mildly oblivious to the fact that Shevchenko, the greatest player their country has ever produced, was watching.Dark spots mark bomb damage on a soccer field in Irpin, Ukraine, in 2022.Valentyn Ogirenko/ReutersOne of the strengths Ukrainians in general have discovered during the war, Shevchenko has found, is an ability “to adapt to circumstances, to react to the situation as it is now.” Here it was, being played out in front of him.When he asked the children what it was like having to play here, in a place where a stadium used to be, they replied in that matter-of-fact manner that is the natural tone of the preteen: They might not have a stadium, they said, but that did not mean they did not want to play soccer.As the fighting was escalating in Irpin, Heorhiy Sudakov — a sparkling young midfielder with Shakhtar Donetsk — was, like so many in Ukraine, seeking shelter wherever he could find it. He sent one of his former coaches a photo from an air-raid bunker. In the image, his pregnant wife, Lisa, rested her head on his shoulder.A little more than a year later, Sudakov has spent two weeks announcing himself as one of the brightest talents in European soccer. He helped drive Ukraine’s teams to the semifinals of the European Under-21 Championship in Georgia, scoring three times in five games, including two in the quarterfinal victory against France.The 20-year-old striker Heorhiy Sudakov, right, led Ukraine to the semifinals of the European Under-21 Championship.Robert Ghement/EPA, via ShutterstockThat Ukraine was unceremoniously eliminated in the final four by Spain — which will face England in the final this weekend — would, in normal circumstances, act as a sort of bathetic coda to its tournament. Ukraine’s circumstances, though, are anything but normal. In that light, its performance has been a resounding, uplifting triumph.“What the under-21s have done is an incredible achievement,” Shevchenko said in an interview this week. “Ukraine has always provided great talent — maybe not every year, but every few years, we have a young player who can go up to the senior squad. You need to build that platform. Watching what they have done in this tournament gives hope to us, and to the next generation, for the future.”Nobody in Ukraine knows, of course, what that future looks like. Since the country’s soccer league resumed last August, Ukraine’s clubs have grown used to playing against the eerie backdrop of empty stadiums. Games have been interrupted by those same air-raid sirens that still send a shiver down Shevchenko’s spine. Dozens of foreign players left the country after being given dispensation by FIFA to break their contracts.Several teams, including Shakhtar, temporarily relocated their academy systems abroad — spiriting players and members of their families out of the country — to protect them from the Russian invasion. Some clubs, Shakhtar most prominent among them, still find themselves exiled from their homes, their traditional territories now on the other side of the front line.It is impossible to say when, or if, any of that will change. Like everything else in the country, every person in every aspect of life, Ukrainian soccer has no idea what tomorrow will bring.“We live in the moment,” Shevchenko said. “Everything depends on the war. The situation could change every day. We try to make plans, sometimes short-term, sometimes a little longer. But we have to react every day.“We do the best we can to let the athletes train, to help them be ready to play — that is what all of us, every club, are trying to do. We have the resources to do that at the moment. But we cannot plan anything for the future, because the moment we do, everything could change. That is what we have to do. There is not a different way. We just have to keep living and try to do the best we can.”In light of all that is happening in Ukraine, soccer is not a priority, nor should it be. It is difficult, in many ways, to think that it matters at all. But talking to Shevchenko is to be reminded of Jürgen Klopp’s old aphorism: Perhaps it is the most important of the least important things.Shevchenko playing soccer with children in Irpin, in a photograph from United24, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s fund-raising platform.United24Sports, after all, remain a potent way of reminding people of what Ukraine has been through — is going through. They are a way of keeping the country uppermost in the fickle thoughts of the outside world, a gleaming example of what the historian Eric Hobsbawm described as the “imagined community of millions seeming more real as a team of eleven named people.”Soccer has, by and large, embraced that role. “It has a power to unite people,” Shevchenko said. “To send a message of solidarity.” Stadiums across Europe have been festooned with Ukrainian flags. Messages demanding peace have appeared on television screens and advertising boards — a gesture that is, without question, too small, a coward’s way out from Europe’s ever-compromised soccer authorities, but is a gesture nonetheless.When Shevchenko, with his successor as Ukraine’s national team captain, Oleksandr Zinchenko — both ambassadors for United24, the country’s official fund-raising platform — decided to arrange an exhibition game to help rebuild a school in the village of Chernihiv, support was immediate and enthusiastic. Chelsea, one of Shevchenko’s former clubs, volunteered the use of Stamford Bridge for the match, called the Game4Ukraine, on Aug. 5. DAZN and Sky agreed to broadcast it. A parade of stars quickly agreed to play.“It is a good chance for us to remind people that the war is still going on,” Shevchenko said. “Oleksandr and I have done a lot of interviews, to try to keep it in the news, so that the rest of the world does not forget, so that people keep helping, because we need them to know that we cannot do this without them.”For Ukraine, every event featuring one of its teams is now a rallying point, and a chance to tell its story.Martin Meissner/Associated PressBut soccer matters for another reason. It is telling that the success of Ukraine’s under-21 team — as well as an encouraging start as national team manager for Serhiy Rebrov, Shevchenko’s old strike partner — has not gone unnoticed within Ukraine, that the achievements of Sudakov and his teammates have been celebrated, even as the sirens have sounded.“There is still room for life, still room for sport,” Shevchenko said. “That is why we are fighting: for the right to have a normal life. Even during the war, we try to live as best we can. It has to be day to day.”The conversation he had with the children in Irpin inspired Shevchenko. When he left, he set about raising the money — roughly 600,000 euros, or $650,000 — it would take to ensure that they could both play soccer and have a stadium. He arranged a gala in Milan, the city he long called home. The club where he became a superstar, and possibly the best striker of his generation, A.C. Milan, kicked in €150,000 toward the project.The plan is to begin work on the stadium this summer. It is impossible, of course, to plan for anything with absolute certainty. Ukrainians have, in the course of 18 fearful, defiant, harrowing months, grown used to the idea that things might change at a moment’s notice. They do not know what tomorrow will bring. But they know there will be a tomorrow.CorrespondenceThis week brought a regrettable, but undeniable, turn in the timbre of correspondence. This is, as we all know, a conspiratorial age — the false flags, the deep state, the thing about orcas ganging up and attacking boats — and that paranoia now seems to have filtered through to the last bastion of enlightenment thinking: my inbox.“Writing that Botafogo, RWD Molenbeek and Lyon are linked together without mentioning Crystal Palace,” an exasperated Nicholas Armstrong wrote after receiving last week’s newsletter, “is like saying whales, dolphins and porpoises are linked without mentioning any other more familiar mammal.”I am not entirely certain which mammal is missing from that list — sharks, maybe? — but I stand by my entirely deliberate omission: not because I have not yet forgiven Palace for the whole Alan Pardew thing in 1990, but because, unlike that particular set of clubs, Palace is not owned exclusively by John Textor. It is, instead, a partial member of two networks: one belonging to Textor, and one operated by Bolt Football. And that would have been confusing.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPaul Gerald, meanwhile, has been pondering an unexplainable, at least to him, coincidence. “Whenever there is a neutral venue final, each team always attacks the end containing their fans in the second half,” he wrote.He added, “There are three ways this could happen: crazy coincidence; teams just always picking that way, regardless of who wins the coin toss; or prearrangement.” In this scenario, he suggested, “no real coin toss ever happens.”There is, I suspect, a slightly simpler explanation: Both teams go into the coin toss intending to kick toward their own fans in the second half. There is a possibility, though, that there is a degree of confirmation bias at play here, too. My guess would be it happens less often than you believe — you just notice when it does.Victor Gallo, thankfully, wants to return to the world of facts. Last week’s newsletter taught him that the Colombian league is divided into Apertura and Clausura stages. “I thought only Mexico employed that division,” he wrote. “I imagine it is not just Mexico and Colombia. But what’s the reason behind splitting the season up?”That is a great question, and not one I have previously considered. It means you can hand out more trophies? It delivers satisfaction more quickly? It means you can stage a grand final at the end? If anyone can shed any light, it would be enormously helpful.And finally, with a nod to William Ireland, a confession. Last week’s newsletter asserted that nobody — other than Red Bull — had really made the multiclub model work in soccer as yet. “Best practices being shared, discount transfer fees, places to park players all sound good,” he wrote. “None seem to be actually happening in any of the multiclubs, and I’m not sure how they would.”Nor am I, but there was one element that I neglected to mention (and was pointed out to me, anonymously, by an executive at one of the teams involved in a network). Off the field, the advantages are legion. Adding more clubs enables a group to increase the asset value of each — by building infrastructure, improving performance, pooling resources — which helps the value of the whole business grow. It may well be that is the real purpose of the whole exercise. More

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      When Your Champions League Dream Runs Through a War Zone

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      Shakhtar Donetsk’s foreign stars fled Ukraine when Russia invaded. Now some are returning or signing up, proof that the lure of opportunity can trump fear.By the time Lassina Traoré returned to his team, everybody else was gone.In 2021, Traoré, a forward from Burkina Faso, had joined the other expensive foreign recruits lured to Ukraine by the country’s perennial soccer champion, Shakhtar Donetsk. Back then, Traoré played in a team built around a Brazilian core, supplemented by other foreign talent and some of Ukrainian soccer’s best players, for a club that was regarded as arguably the top team in Eastern Europe. Then the Russian bombs began to fall, and everything changed.When Shakhtar returned to practice after a monthslong hiatus abroad, the cosmopolitan air of the club had vanished. A roster that had been dotted with almost a dozen Brazilians just over a year ago now contains only one. Clubs elsewhere in Europe, shopping for bargains amid broken contracts, skimmed off other talent. Even Roberto de Zerbi, Shakhtar’s highly rated Italian coach, had moved on.Traoré, like all the others, could have gone, too. FIFA, soccer’s governing body, issued an edict shortly after the start of the war that allowed foreigners, whatever their contractual status, to unilaterally quit Ukrainian teams and sign elsewhere.Traoré was vacationing in Barcelona on the day Russia invaded Ukraine. He could only follow from afar as Shakhtar’s foreign stars — crammed in a hotel conference room with their families — pleaded for help as war planes circled the skies above Kyiv. Within a few days, they had left the country. Those who escaped did not return.Traoré returned to Amsterdam, where he had previously played for the Dutch club Ajax, to wait out the early months of the war. While the rest of Shakhtar’s armada of foreign talent found new clubs — some back home in Brazil, others in Europe — Traoré took his time. Slowly, the thought of returning to Shakhtar started to look like not only a viable option but the right thing to do.“I had many options,” he said after a recent practice in Kyiv, where the team has been based for the last few weeks. “The club knows. I know. And we discussed it. But I decided to stay.”For him, he said, “it’s in my culture that when they give you something, you have to give something back. For me, it was time to give back the love they gave me before.”Traoré said that he understood why many of his teammates decided not to return. He admitted that he had some difficult conversations with his wife and parents before agreeing to do so. (His wife is now living with his parents at their home in Paris.)For most of the season the team lived in a hotel complex in the western city of Lviv, but it has recently moved to Kyiv, closer to its training ground. A return to Donetsk, in the east, is out of the question; Russian forces have controlled the city since last year, joining separatists that forced Shakhtar into exile as long ago as 2014.The club Traoré has rejoined is a shadow of the powerhouse it once was. The squad and its finances have been gutted; Shakhtar estimates that it has lost at least $40 million worth of talent for nothing as a result of FIFA’s decision to let players walk away from their contracts.Shakhtar and rivals like Dynamo Kyiv play their league matches in empty stadiums. Shakhtar remains on course for a return to the Champions League next season.Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters“We have no money,” the club’s chief executive, Sergei Palkin, said on a recent visit to London. The Ukrainian league’s return, as much a symbol of the country’s resolve as a sporting competition, is played out in front of empty stands and to the sound of occasional air raid sirens forcing players from the field. The league’s television contract has collapsed. Sponsors have all but disappeared.“We have no income from Ukraine,” Palkin said. “Zero.”What money there is has come from Shakhtar’s presence in the Champions League and the Europa League, European soccer’s second-tier competition, and from the record transfer fee the club received by selling its star Ukrainian forward Mykhailo Mudruyk to Chelsea in England.New money cannot come soon enough. While FIFA allowed foreign players to leave Shakhtar without a fee, it insisted the club pay any debts to the clubs it signed those foreign players from, including a handful that did not play a single minute for the club because of the war, according to Palkin.Traoré’s decision to return, then, came as a pleasant surprise. He had cost the club $10 million in a transfer fee when he joined from Ajax in 2021. A forward who was not considered a mainstay before the war, he is suddenly a pivotal figure, and not just for what he is doing on the field.His continued presence, Traoré and the club hope, is a sign to potential recruits that soccer in Ukraine remains a viable career option. It is an option that proved alluring to players with European dreams like Kevin Kelsy, an 18-year-old striker from Venezuela.The 18-year-old Venezuelan striker Kevin Kelsy said his family was worried about his move to Shakhtar. “When I told them, they asked, ‘Why Ukraine?’” Yoan Valat/EPA, via ShutterstockNot so long ago Kelsy would not have been a target for Shakhtar, which for years used the wealth of its oligarch owner to shop at a higher price bracket. But now, in its more straitened state, Shakhtar has turned to eager young players like Kelsy and recruits from Georgia and Tajikistan.Kelsy said signing a five-year contract with a club in a country at war was a surprisingly easy decision. The prospect of fulfilling a dream of making it to Europe trumped everything else, he said — even the persistent threat from Russian missiles and planes, the regular drone of air raid sirens and the rumble of distant explosions. His family, though, had questions.“When I told them, they asked, ‘Why Ukraine?’” he said in an interview in Spanish. “They knew everything that happened, and there was a little bit of nervousness and a little of fear. But I spoke to them about this theme, that it’s very important for me to go to play football in Europe, in a big team like Shakhtar, and in the end they understood.”Kelsy, like the scores of South Americans who have signed for Ukrainian clubs in the past, views the club as a steppingstone on a journey that he hopes might one day propel him to the club of his dreams, A.C. Milan. Games in elite competitions like the Champions League, he knows, offer an elite stage to show he belongs. (Shakhtar, which led the Ukrainian league entering the weekend, is on track to return to the competition next season.)Having lost so many players, Palkin, the Shakhtar chief executive, now insists that any new recruits sign contracts that include clauses that would prevent them from taking advantage of any FIFA regulations that would allow them to suddenly leave. Any player who signs on now, he said, surely understands the commitment they are making.So strong is the pull of making it as a professional in Europe, though, that Kelsy said not even war could stop him from coming. “I try not to think about it,” he said, “and focus on what matters now.”As a new recruit, Kelsy knows no other reality as a Shakhtar player. That is not the case for Traoré, who recalls far more luxurious times. In those days, jet travel and big crowds were the norm, not the long, arduous bus journeys that are now required to fulfill fixtures in empty stadiums.“It’s not normal life like we used to have: no home, you can’t see family, and also you have to always be careful, sirens on all the time,” he said. “But you get used to it.” More

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      Shakhtar Donetsk Claims FIFA Rule Is Hurting Teams From Ukraine

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      A hearing will be held over a rule that allows overseas players to suspend their contracts with Ukrainian teams during the Russian invasion.LONDON — Fresh from the conclusion of the men’s World Cup, soccer’s governing body FIFA faces a legal challenge of its rule that allowed players to immediately leave Ukrainian club teams because of Russia’s invasion.On Thursday, sport’s top court will begin hearing a more than $40 million claim for damages brought against FIFA by a top Ukrainian soccer team.The hearing at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland, centers on a temporary rule by FIFA that allowed overseas players on Ukrainian teams to suspend their contracts and sign for teams elsewhere. The Ukrainian league stopped play for about six months, then restarted in August.Shakhtar Donetsk, the club that is bringing the claim, has lost several of its top players without receiving a transfer fee under a regulation first implemented in March. The system is slated to run at least until June next year.Under FIFA’s emergency statute change, the suspension is only temporary, meaning that many players will eventually have to return to their host teams in Ukraine as their contracts continue to run. But with little sign of the war ending, many of those players may be out of contract by the time FIFA lifts the temporary order, which would enable them to leave as free agents.The State of the WarA Botched Invasion: Secret battle plans, intercepts and interviews with soldiers and Kremlin confidants offer new insight into the stunning failures of Russia’s military in Ukraine.A New Russian Offensive? A top adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine is bracing for the possibility that Russia will sharply escalate the war in a winter offensive that could include mass infantry attacks.Putin in Belarus: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia made a rare visit to Belarus, raising concerns in Ukraine that Russian forces could aim again at Kyiv, which is near the Belarusian border.The War in the Skies: As Ukrainian officials warn of a new Russian ground offensive, waves of Russian missiles continue to batter Ukraine’s infrastructure. The attacks are leaving a trail of destruction and grief.“We want fairness and justice,” Sergei Palkin, Shakhtar’s chief executive, told The New York Times. “On one side FIFA protects players but it should also protect clubs.”FIFA did not respond to a message seeking comment.Shakhtar has seen millions of dollars’ worth of talent leave for nothing since the invasion started, losing a crucial source of revenue it requires to balance its books. Last summer, it could only watch as top players moved without fees to teams in England’s Premier League, historically a lucrative market for Shakhtar, and also to France’s top division.“Two days before FIFA made the announcement, we almost had a contract on the table: we were to sign the next day,” Palkin said of one high value sale that was scuttled. The club pulled out from the talks, he added, learning it could instead register the same player for free.To make matters worse, no special provisions have been put in place for Ukrainian teams whose finances have been crushed by the ongoing war. The league was initially suspended before restarting without fans, even as the war continues. Several matches have been suspended by air raid sirens, with players and officials forced to take cover in shelters.Shakhtar and the other Ukrainian teams are still required to pay money owed to teams outside the country, including for players that have been allowed to suspend their contracts.Palkin described an example of one situation in which the team agreed to sign a player from an Italian team just before the Russian invasion. The player never set foot in Ukraine and was allowed to move elsewhere, leaving Shakthar on the hook for about $9 million. It asked his former team to scrap the deal and to sell him elsewhere, but those talks floundered. Shakhtar has balked at the payment, Palkin said, and the club, which he declined to name, is asking FIFA to punish Shakhtar.Palkin said efforts to come to an arrangement with FIFA have largely been met with silence. Multiple Ukrainian teams have asked the governing body to suspend their obligations to other clubs until normal operations can be established. He also suggested FIFA, which announced it had made $7.5 billion from the World Cup in Qatar, could also establish “a reparation fund” for Ukrainian teams.Shakhtar, which is owned by the billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, has the highest payroll among Ukrainian teams. But it is also benefiting from playing in the Champions League, Europe’s top club competition. Its home games are played across the border in Poland and have provided a lucrative — and much needed — financial boost, as well as providing a platform for its domestically reared talent, which, unlike foreign players, are not able to suspend their contracts.That has allowed Palkin to try and negotiate player sales ahead of the opening of the midseason European player trading window next month. He attended meetings in London recently with English clubs interested in signing forward Mykhailo Mudryk, 21, who is considered to be one of European soccer’s biggest emerging talents.Palkin said he is conscious of teams looking to take advantage of his team’s situation and is unwilling to be forced to sell for a below-market price despite the ongoing hardship. That means Mudryk could remain with Shakhtar until next summer’s off-season, a time when the biggest trades are typically made. “It’s quite a long negotiation process,” he said.The Ukrainian league is currently on break for the winter and is scheduled to restart in March. By then, there should be a resolution in Shakhtar’s case against FIFA.“We want to sit together with all the stakeholders and work out a plan,” Palkin said. “And we want fairness and justice.” More

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      Soccer’s Return to Ukraine Is Marred by Broken Contracts and Bad Faith

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      European soccer offered support to Ukrainian teams when Russia invaded the country. Now, as rivals bargain shop in wartime, one top club says the sense of solidarity is gone.Like his fellow chief executives at soccer clubs across Europe, Sergei Palkin of the Ukrainian team Shakhtar Donetsk spent weeks this summer negotiating player trades.He and Fulham, a team newly promoted to England’s Premier League, settled on a fee of about $8 million for Manor Solomon, Shakhtar’s Israeli attacker. Then Palkin agreed to accept a payment around double that amount from Lyon, in France’s Ligue 1, for another of Shakhtar’s foreign-born stars, the 22-year-old Brazilian midfielder Tetê.The deals were a financial lifeline for Shakhtar: They would deliver a vital cash infusion to club accounts battered by war with Russia in exchange for valuable talents who, in some cases, no longer wanted to play in Ukraine.But just when the contracts for the deals, and others, were about to be signed, world soccer’s governing body, FIFA, announced that it had extended a regulation allowing foreign players under contract with Ukrainian clubs to temporarily go elsewhere without penalty. The rule — created in March as an interim measure when Ukraine’s season was suspended — would now remain in place for the entire 2022-23 season, FIFA said.And with that, both Lyon and Fulham informed Palkin that they were scrapping the multimillion-dollar deals the sides had discussed. Instead, they would take the players for nothing.“They just talk about the football family,” Palkin said. “But in real life there is no football family.”The Shakhtar chief executive Sergei Palkin.Bradley Secker for The New York TimesA Lyon spokesman said the club disputed Palkin’s recounting of events, but declined to provide details. Fulham declined to comment.Both teams abided by the rules, but the incidents — and others — have left Palkin frustrated and angry. In July, Shakhtar announced plans to sue FIFA for $50 million — the value, it says, of deals that vaporized when the rule allowing players to break their Ukrainian contracts was extended.The situation is a far cry from the widespread messages of solidarity with Ukraine from soccer’s leaders and rival teams in the days and weeks after Russia’s invasion began in February. Instead, Palkin says he has been left with a distaste for the way some in the soccer community have treated Ukrainian clubs like Shakhtar. Shows of support and kind words have been replaced by broken promises and the poaching of players and youth prospects, all of it, in his view, driven by the oil that lubricates the industry: money.The State of the WarZaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant: After United Nations inspectors visited the Russian-controlled facility last week amid continuing shelling and fears of a looming nuclear catastrophe, the organization released a report calling for Russia and Ukraine to halt all military activity around the complex.Europe’s Energy Crisis: European leaders are pushing through economic relief packages to soften the blow of soaring costs tied to the war. In Germany, officials are trying a range of measures to alleviate the crisis, including extending the lives of two of the country’s last nuclear reactors.Russia’s Military Expansion: Though President Vladimir V. Putin ordered a sharp increase in the size of Russia’s armed forces, he seems reluctant to declare a draft. Here is why.Relying on Old Tech: Russia’s new cruise missiles and attack helicopters appear to contain low-tech components, analysts found, undercutting Moscow’s narrative of a rebuilt military that rivals its Western adversaries.Lyon, for example, recently offered to pay Shakhtar 3 million euros, or about $3.01 million, for the permanent transfer of Tetê, Palkin said — less than one-fifth of what Shakhtar believed it had agreed on as a fee for him earlier this summer. Palkin turned down the offer.“It’s ridiculous,” he said. “It’s peanuts. It’s not respectful from FIFA or the clubs.”FIFA said its position of allowing foreign players under contract with Ukrainian teams to play elsewhere temporarily is better than the alternative: players’ unilaterally breaking their contracts. But while there appears to be no sign that the war is ending, there is now also little likelihood that many of the players will ever return to their Ukrainian clubs.When Shakhtar takes the field on Tuesday for its first game on Ukrainian soil since last December — part of the long-delayed restart of the country’s top league — very little will be the same beyond the team’s familiar burnt orange colors. For the first time in two decades, a team known for stocking its roster with imported stars will be almost exclusively Ukrainian. There will be no fans at the stadium in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital and Shakhtar’s latest temporary home, for the match against Metalist 1925. And the players from both teams will have gone through drills of what to do in the event they hear the air raid siren while they are on the field.Nothing is normal, Palkin admitted, but for the sake of Ukrainian soccer, the games must be played. If the season does not start, he said, some soccer clubs in the country would probably fold.Two clubs are already gone from the 16-team league: F.C. Mariupol and Desna Chernihiv, which both announced they their withdrawals ahead of this season. Chernihiv, near the border with Belarus, has been battered by Russian forces, and Mariupol, a southern port city, is now under Russian control. The city, besieged for weeks, has been described by the United Nations as the “deadliest place in Ukraine.”Even in other cities, though, signs of war will be hard to avoid. Palkin said the threat of a Russian attack on matches cannot be discounted.“They can target anything in Ukraine,” he said of the Russian military and its allies in the war. Shakhtar will play its games in Kyiv and Lviv, the city where, at the start of the war, the club helped pay to convert the soccer stadium it had been using into a shelter for refugees.Families living inside the Arena Lviv, which will host some of Shakhtar’s matches when Ukraine’s top soccer league opens its delayed season this week.Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesShakhtar also will play in Europe’s top club competition, the Champions League, but those games will be held in Warsaw because European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, has barred Ukraine from hosting international games as a safety precaution.Shakhtar officials had proposed playing the Ukrainian league games outside the country, too. But the government overruled the idea, deciding that live games, even in empty stadiums and in the comparatively safer western part of the country, would serve as an important prong of the propaganda war.“Ukrainian sports and the will to win on all fronts cannot be stopped!” Ukraine’s sports minister, Vadym Gutzeit, wrote on his Facebook page last week. His post, heralding the return of the Ukrainian Premier League, outlined a list of protocols that must be followed at each game, including evacuation plans, fixed shelters no more than 500 meters, or about 1,640 feet, from each stadium, and a script for stadium announcers in the event that air raid sirens sound: “Attention! Air alarm! We ask everyone to follow us to the shelter!”While Gutzeit’s post highlighted the extraordinary conditions in which soccer will return to Ukraine, it also underlined why many players were not eager to return and take part.Palkin said about 10 players from Shakhtar’s under-19 team had refused to return to Ukraine, where a youth league is also being organized. “I understand them,” he said. “I can’t guarantee they will be safe.” More

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      The Stranded Sons of Shakhtar Donetsk

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      One of Ukraine’s top soccer teams rushed its youth academy players out of the path of war in February. Months later, many of the boys are stuck in a lonely limbo.SPLIT, Croatia — It was in their moment of triumph, when they had beaten their opponents and come together to collect their medals, when some of the boys were overcome with sadness, when the tears welled in their eyes.The teenagers, a mix of 13- and 14-year-olds representing one of the youth squads of the top Ukrainian soccer team Shakhtar Dontesk, had just won a tournament in Split, the Croatian city that has provided them with a refuge from war. Each boy was presented with a medal, and the team received a trophy to mark the victory.The lucky ones got to celebrate and pose for pictures with their mothers. For most of the others, though, there was no one — just another vivid reminder of how lonely life has become, of how far away they remain from the people they love and the places they know. It is in these moments, the adults around the players have come to realize, when emotions are at their most raw, when the tears sometimes come.“As a mother I feel it,” said Natalia Plaminskaya, who was able to accompany her twin boys to Croatia but said she felt for families who could not do the same. “I want to hug them, play with them, make them feel better.”Many of the Shakhtar academy players, in orange, are entering their fourth month away from their homes and families in Ukraine.Shakhtar DonetskIt has all happened so fast. In those first frantic days after Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year, Shakhtar Donetsk, one of Eastern Europe’s powerhouse clubs, moved quickly to evacuate its teams and staff members out of harm’s way. Foreign players gathered their families and found their way home. Parts of the first team wound up in Turkey, and then Slovenia, setting up a base from which they played friendly matches to raise awareness and money and kept alive Ukraine’s hopes for World Cup qualification.But scores of players and staff members from Shakhtar’s youth academy needed sanctuary, too. Phone calls were placed. Buses were arranged. But decisions had to be made quickly, and only about a dozen mothers were able to accompany the boys on the journey. (Wartime rules required that their fathers — all men of fighting age, in fact, ages 18 to 60 — had to remain in Ukraine.) Other families made different choices: to stay with husbands and relatives, to send their boys off alone. All of the options were imperfect. None of the decisions were easy.Three months later, the weight of separation, of loneliness — of everything — has taken its toll.“It’s a nightmare, it’s a nightmare,” said Edgar Cardoso, who leads Shakhtar’s youth teams. He repeats his words to underline how fragile the atmosphere has become within the walls of the seaside hotel that has become the Shakhtar group’s temporary home. “You see that emotions are now on the peak.”“I’m not a guy to lie and to show too much optimism and say things like, ‘Don’t worry, we will be back soon,’” Cardoso said. “I try to be realistic.”Shakhtar DonetskNo one knows when all this will end: not the war, not the separation, not the uncertainty. No one can say, for example, even if they will remain together. More than a dozen top clubs across Europe, teams like Barcelona and Bayern Munich, have already cherry-picked the most talented of Shakhtar’s stranded sons, offering to train the best 14- to 17-year-olds in the comparative safety of Germany and Spain.Better Understand the Russia-Ukraine WarHistory and Background: Here’s what to know about Russia and Ukraine’s relationship and the causes of the conflict.How the Battle Is Unfolding: Russian and Ukrainian forces are using a bevy of weapons as a deadly war of attrition grinds on in eastern Ukraine.Outside Pressures: Governments, sports organizations and businesses are taking steps to punish Russia. Here are some of the sanctions adopted so far and a list of companies that have pulled out of the country.Stay Updated: To receive the latest updates on the war in your inbox, sign up here. The Times has also launched a Telegram channel to make its journalism more accessible around the world.Those players’ departures have left Cardoso with mixed feelings. On the one hand, their absence hurts the quality of the training sessions. But there is also pride that others are so interested in the boys Shakhtar has developed.When, or if, they will return is not clear: The rule change that had allowed Ukrainian players and prospects fleeing the war to join other clubs was supposed to end June 30. But FIFA on Tuesday extended the exemptions until the summer of 2023.For Cardoso, a well-traveled Portuguese coach who moved to Shakhtar eight years ago after a stint developing youth soccer in Qatar, the implications of the war mean he has now been thrust into a new role: father figure and focal point for dozens of teenage boys dislocated from their families and everything they knew.Once the club had spirited him, his young charges, a handful of their mothers and a few staff members out of Kyiv to Croatia, where they had been offered a new base by the Croatian team Hajduk Split, Cardoso, 40, decided to create an approximation of normality with whatever, and whoever, was available.Natalia Plaminskaya with her twin sons. Shakhtar DonetskWhile in Ukraine, each generation of young players had two dedicated coaches, doctors, access to dedicated fitness instructors and analysts. In Split, the setup is considerably more rudimentary.Now a single female fitness coach looks after all the boys. One of the team’s administrators, a former player now in his 60s, helps run the daily training sessions. Mothers help set up cones, oversee meal times or accompany the children on excursions, which typically means a short walk down a dusty track to the local beach. About halfway down the path, a piece of graffiti written in black letters marks the boys’ presence in Croatia: “Slava Ukraini,” it reads. Glory to Ukraine.Along with Cardoso, perhaps the figure with the most outsize importance in ensuring things run smoothly is Ekateryna Afanasenko. A Donetsk native in her 30s and now in her 15th year with the club, Afanasenko was working in Shakhtar’s human resources department in 2014 when the team first fled after Russian-backed separatists attacked Donetsk, the club’s home city in eastern Ukraine.Back then, Afanasenko was a part of the team’s emergency efforts, charged with shepherding 100 members of the club’s youth academy to safety. Once the team eventually settled in Kyiv, Afanasenko’s role evolved to include oversight of education and administration of a new facility where many of the displaced children lived.The players fill their ample downtime by playing card games and taking turns on two video game consoles recently donated to the group by the Red Cross.Shakhtar DonetskNow in Split after another escape from another Russian assault, the responsibilities for both Afanasenko and Cardoso have grown to such an extent that Afanasenko has a simple explanation for what they do: “We are like mother and father.”Shakhtar has extended an open invitation to relatives of other boys to travel to the camp.Elena Kostrytsa recently arrived for a three-week stay to ensure her son Alexander did not spend his 16th birthday alone. “I haven’t seen my son for three months, so you can imagine how this feels,” said Kostrytsa, as Alexander, dressed in training gear, looked on. His younger sister Diana had also made the 1,200-mile trip. But even this reunion was bittersweet: Ukraine’s laws meant Alexander’s father could not be present.The makeshift soccer camp is now as much of a distraction as an elite-level education for a career in professional sports. Doing the best he can, Cardoso has divided the players into four groups, separating them roughly by age, and works out half at a time.He holds two sessions simultaneously, using the time on the field with half the players to send the team bus — emblazoned with Shakhtar’s branding — back to the hotel to collect the rest of the trainees. On the field, Cardoso barks orders in a voice made raspy through the daily sessions, and without his translator.Ekateryna Afanasenko with a team of Shakhtar boys after they won a tournament in Croatia.Shakhtar DonetskYet an air of uncertainty pervades everything for Shakhtar’s staff and young players, heading into a fourth month in their Croatian exile.“I’m not a guy to lie and to show too much optimism and say things like, ‘Don’t worry, we will be back soon,’” Cardoso said. “I try to be realistic.”For the foreseeable future, all he, Afanasenko and the others holed up at the Hotel Zagreb can do is provide a safe environment for the players, preserve the connections they share and reunite them with their families as soon as they can. There will be more waiting, more worry, more tears.“Every day in the morning and in the night, I start my day calling my family and end my day calling my family,” Afanasenko said. “I think every one of these boys is doing the same. But what can we change?” More

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      Exiled by Russian Bombs, Shakhtar Donetsk Embraces Its Journey

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      It wasn’t the sounds of the bombs, though he did hear those, that brought back the memories for Darijo Srna. It was the air raid sirens.When they blared in Kyiv shortly after 6 a.m. on Feb. 24, Srna froze in terror. His mind flooded with thoughts and recollections of his childhood, of his first experience with war, when the former Yugoslavia broke apart in the 1990s.Since then, soccer has taken Srna, 39, far from his home in Croatia to a distinguished career, the bulk of it with the Ukrainian club Shakhtar Donetsk, where he is currently the director of football, and to games in the Champions League and at two World Cups. But in an instant, the sounds of sirens brought it all back.“I started to panic,” he said. “You have some trauma for all your life, for sure — deep in yourself. That is something you try to forget. But you can never forget these types of things.”Shakhtar Donetsk had run from bombs before. In 2014, the last time Russian forces invaded Ukraine, missiles landed on Shakhtar’s stadium. Within days, the club packed and headed west, beginning a nomadic existence: to a new home in Lviv, in the far west of the country, and then east again, to Kharkiv, before settling in the capital, Kyiv.Darijo Srna, who spent 15 years at Shakhtar as a player, is now a top official at the club.Bradley Secker for The New York TimesNow Shakhtar is on the move again. Last week, after receiving special permission to take military-age men out of the country, its players and coaches landed in Istanbul. With war leading to the suspension of the second half of the Ukrainian season, Shakhtar will soon become a touring team, playing exhibition games — the first was Saturday in Greece — to bring attention to the plight of Ukrainians and to raise money for the war effort.Shakhtar Donetsk had never stopped being a team. Now, it hopes, it will be a symbol, too.“I don’t know which kind of team in the history of football can be compared to us,” Srna said. “No other team has ever felt or lived what we have in these past eight years.”A Team in ExileShakhtar players training in Istanbul last week. They needed government permission to leave Ukraine, where an emergency law requires military age men to stay.Bradley Secker for The New York TimesShakhtar officials had been convinced there would not be a war, even as Russia massed forces and equipment on Ukraine’s border; even as the players began to fret; even as worried family members called them daily at a winter training camp in Turkey with news, warnings, pleas.A Guide to the 2022 World CupThe 32-team tournament kicks off in Qatar on Nov. 21.F.A.Q.: When will the games take place? Who are the favorites? Will Lionel Messi be there? Our primer answers your questions.The Matchups: The group assignments are set. Here’s a breakdown of the draw and a look at how each country qualified.U.S. Returns: Five years after a calamitous night cost the U.S. a World Cup bid, a new generation claimed a berth in the 2022 tournament.The Host: After a decade of scrutiny and criticism, there is a sense that Qatar will at last get the payoff it always expected for hosting the World Cup.So in February, Sergei Palkin, Shakhtar’s chief executive, called a meeting in an effort to assuage the growing concerns.“I said that everything would be OK because the president of Ukraine, everybody, was saying that no problems, war will not come,” Palkin said.The team flew back to Kyiv. But Palkin was wrong. Three days later, Russian troops streamed across the border, and rather than prepare to play the second half of its league season, the team’s management suddenly found itself needing to make altogether different calculations.While many of Shakhtar’s Ukrainian players relocated to Lviv, which hosted the team when it was first forced to leave Donetsk, a group of more than 50 players and staff members took refuge in a hotel owned by the team owner Rinat Akhmetov. From there, timely help and frantic phone calls helped forge a plan to get the club’s foreign players and their families to safety.Srna was a key conduit in those discussions, which also involved players’ unions, Ukrainian and neighboring soccer federations and the sport’s governing body in Europe, UEFA. He said his own experiences — he was also a member of the team the last time it fled to safety, in 2014 — served as a guide.“Unfortunately,” he said ruefully, “this is my third war.”Only after the players were on their way home to South America and elsewhere did Srna embark on a journey of his own: what turned out to be a 37-hour drive to Croatia, where much of his family still lives, to reassure them he was safe. Two family members on his father’s side were killed after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, so his weren’t the only nerves that needed calming.Sergei Palkin had tried to reassure his team that there would be no war. He was wrong.Bradley Secker for The New York TimesAfter touching base, though, Srna quickly set about tackling a new task: how to move the dozens of children based in Shakhtar’s youth academy outside Kyiv out of harm’s way. The effort was professional but also intensely personal: Many of the children were only 12 and 13, about the age Srna had been when he first experienced war.Hajduk Split, Srna’s first professional club, said it would be willing to accommodate the boys if they could get to the city. Dinamo Zagreb, another Croatian team, said it would provide buses if Shakhtar could get the players to Ukraine’s border with Hungary. The players and the rest of Shakhtar’s traveling party spent two days at Dinamo’s stadium, Srna said, where they were fed and evaluated by doctors before moving on to Split.Today, because of the effort, more than 80 children, some of their mothers and a few aging coaches and medical staff members are safely in Croatia, far from the worst horrors of war, training and even playing games again.“I just put myself in their situation,” Srna said of his involvement. “I didn’t want these children to stay and listen all day to bombing and bullets.“What I remember when I was a kid, I remember who gave me chocolate, who gave me a ball, who gave me water. And that was what was most important.”Waving the FlagShakhtar players wore Ukrainian flags onto the field against Olympiakos on Saturday.Yorgos Karahalis/Associated PressLike every other corner of the Ukrainian population, Shakhtar has been touched by the war in more serious ways, too. A coach from the team’s academy died after his hometown was overrun by Russian forces in the first weeks of the war. Two staff members from the team’s merchandising department have taken up arms.Shakhtar’s training site in Kyiv also bears the scars of conflict. Chunks of its training fields have been gouged by shelling, and artillery fire ripped open sheds where the team stored training equipment.The conflict has also brought renewed attention to figures like Akhmetov, Ukraine’s wealthiest man. Like a handful of oligarchs in Russia, he grew immensely rich — sometimes amid questions of dubious means — in the wild and unpredictable aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union. Akhmetov has made a point to be seen as contributing millions of dollars of his fortune to the war effort, and he said in an interview that he remained committed to his country and team. “All our efforts are focused on the only thing that matters — to help Ukraine win this war,” he said.The efforts of Akhmetov and his soccer team are now entwined with those of the Ukrainian government — relationships that have already helped Shakhtar overcome some unique hurdles. Before it could depart for Turkey, for example, the club needed special government exemptions from an emergency law barring military-age men from leaving the country during the war. Those approvals finally arrived on Wednesday afternoon. Now that it is based in Istanbul, its tour will serve several functions.The games, starting with one against Olympiakos in Athens on Saturday, are viewed in part as a diplomatic tool, a chance to personalize Ukraine’s humanitarian crisis, raise money for the country’s military and provide humanitarian aid for its citizens.But the matches will also play an important sporting role. Several Shakhtar Donetsk players are also members of Ukraine’s national team, and the games will help to ensure their fitness ahead of a key qualification playoff in June for the 2022 World Cup. (Shakhtar’s rival, Dynamo Kyiv, is playing a series of exhibition games for the same reasons; both clubs have said they will call up players from other Ukrainian teams to supplement their rosters, in part so Ukraine has the best chance of advancing to the World Cup in the June playoff.)Shakhtar’s games have multiple aims: to raise awareness about the country’s plight and to keep its national team sharp ahead of a World Cup qualifying playoff in June. Yorgos Karahalis/Associated PressThe Shakhtar team that will take part in the coming tour — matches against Polish and Turkish clubs have been arranged, and games against A-list opponents could follow — has been shorn of much of its international talent: Most of those players exercised an option allowing them to temporarily sign with teams outside Ukraine after the outbreak of war. Most will never return. But some, like the Brazilian defender Marlon, have said they will be back, and others are mulling their options.“We are not angry, we are all human beings,” Srna said. “It’s important they are safe and with their family.”The new season in Ukraine is, for now, scheduled to begin in July. With so much damage to the country and war still raging, the timetable appears to be little more than a place holder. When soccer returns, as it eventually will, nothing will be the same.It is not even clear if Donetsk, Shakhtar’s home, will remain a part of Ukraine, a prospect that could make the team’s temporary exile a permanent one. Whatever the case, whatever the conclusion, team officials said Shakhtar would never turn its back on its roots.“They can put any flag they like in Donetsk,” Srna said. “But Shakhtar will always be from Donetsk; it’s something no one and nothing can ever change.”Wherever Shakhtar ends up calling home, whoever it plays in the interim, one idea remains impossible to even contemplate: games against Russian opponents. Palkin said he was confident European soccer officials would ensure that Ukrainian teams would not cross paths with opponents from Russia in future competitions. But he had a simple answer if Shakhtar was ever faced with such a matchup. “We wouldn’t play,” he said.Louiza Vradi/Reuters More

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      Stranded Soccer Stars, Frantic Calls and a Race to Flee Kyiv

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      “We are here asking for your help,” one Brazilian soccer player pleaded. “There’s no way we can get out.”Inside the windowless conference room of the Kyiv hotel where the soccer stars had gathered, the anxiety was growing by the minute. An aborted attempt to flee had been a disaster. And the sounds of war — mortar fire, rocket blasts, screeching warplanes — provided a near constant reminder of their precarious circumstances.By Saturday morning the group, made up mostly of Brazilians but now swelled by other South Americans and Italians, numbered as many as 70. The players had come to Ukraine to play soccer; weeks earlier, they had taken the field in Champions League, Europe’s richest competition. Now, with their season suspended and Russian forces advancing on the city, they were huddled with their families — wives, partners, young children, aging relatives — and plotting how, and when, to make a run for their lives.“I hope everything will be OK,” one of the stranded Brazilian players, Junior Moraes, said Saturday morning in an interview with The New York Times. Moraes, a forward for the Ukrainian club Shakhtar Donetsk, explained how the group had been hustled to the hotel last week by their team. In the days that followed, as first the country and then the city had come under attack, their ranks expanded after foreign players from a rival club, Dynamo Kyiv, asked to join them.Fearing for their safety and their families’, the players had released a short video that quickly went viral. Food was in short supply, the players said. Necessities like diapers had already run out.“We are here asking for your help,” the Shakhtar player Marlon Santos said, citing the obstacles. “There’s no way we can get out.”Plans to evacuate were hatched and then quickly scrapped. Flights were impossible; Ukraine had shut down civilian aviation, and Russian forces were attacking the airport. Gasoline was in short supply, and a group now numbering in the dozens knew it would be nearly impossible to arrange enough cars, or stay together amid the chaos.Making a run for it carried its own risks, too, since it would have required surrendering their connection with the outside world. The hotel at least had a supply of electricity and, just as crucially, a reliable internet connection, Moraes said.In frantic phone calls, he and others in the group, which included Shakhtar’s coach, Roberto De Zerbi, an Italian, had made contact with consular officials and governments back home. Empathy was abundant. Solutions were not.The players and their families were advised to try to make it to the train station in Kyiv and join the throngs heading west toward Lviv, a city in western Ukraine, closer to the Polish border, that had become a focal point for the exodus from the Russian advance.“In the beginning it seemed like a good idea,” Moraes said of the plan to make a dash for Lviv. “But look, we have babies and old people also here. If you leave the hotel with the internet and electricity keeping us in contact with everybody, and go to another city and stay with kids in the street, how long could we do that before it is very bad?”Shakhtar Donetsk played in the Champions League as recently as December. Now its season has been suspended. Kiko Huesca/EPA, via ShutterstockInstead, the group turned its attention, and its hopes, back to soccer. Shakhtar’s management had arranged for the Brazilians to stay at the hotel as the security situation in Ukraine degenerated. (The team has been based in Kyiv for years, since it was forced to flee Donetsk in 2014 after an earlier Russian-backed assault.) But while team officials assured the group it was working on a solution, none had materialized.The thought of passing another night in the conference room had brought some of those present to the brink of a “psychological collapse,” Moraes said. Several members of the group had tried to make it to safety by fleeing in the early hours of Saturday morning, he said, only to quickly return in a state of shock.“When they went outside there were explosions and they returned screaming in the room,” Moraes said. “It was panic, crazy.”By then the Brazilian players and their families had been joined by a contingent from Argentina and Uruguay. Soon other Brazilians living in Kyiv — but unconnected to soccer — reached out asking for shelter and were welcomed inside.Moraes said De Zerbi, 42, and his assistants had refused to abandon the group. “They had two opportunities to leave us,” Moraes said, “and the coach said, ‘No, I stay here until the end.’”Shortly before his conversation with The Times, though, Moraes had received a phone call. Aleksander Ceferin, the president of European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, was on the line and promising, Moraes said, that “he was pushing to find a solution.”Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3A new diplomatic push. More