“My father died when I was 13, so I used to visit his grave when I went home to my village,” says Ukrainian footballer Taras Stepanenko. “I would tend to the grave and speak to my father. It’s important for him to know that I’m a good person who deserves something from this life.”
Stepanenko, 35, has excelled in life. He’s played almost 100 games in the Uefa Champions League and 87 games for Ukraine, appearing at three European Championships, but the tone of the conversation when he speaks to The National is one of sadness.
“My village of 1,100 people is 70 kilometres from Donetsk,” he explains. “I have not been to Donetsk since 2015 when my grandfather died. Now, I’m nervous and angry because my village has been occupied by Russian troops in the last month. It’s not only my father. My grandfather and all my relatives who died are buried in the village. And now I can’t go.”
Stepanenko can’t go because it’s a live battlefield, but also one in Russian territory. He can’t even get to his former home in Donetsk as he would have to travel via Russia.
“Russia is not a country I want to visit,” he says, the emotion rising. “And even if I wanted to go back it would be impossible.” If a Ukrainian did go back, their mobile phone would be taken for a filtration process at Moscow airport. Any evidence of pro-Ukrainian sentiments found on the phone would mean entry would be denied. Given Stepanenko plays for Ukraine’s – indeed Eastern Europe’s – most successful football club of recent times, he’s not getting in.
Despite playing for one football club for 15 years, Stepanenko has moved far more than he would have liked. It was straightforward at first. He became a professional footballer with Zaporizhzhia in his teens, then moved to Donetsk in 2010. Both places were close to home. After Donetsk entered a pre-war state and it became dangerous in 2014, his family moved west. The conflict followed them in 2022 after the full-scale invasion.
“My family stayed in Zaporizhzhia city but when it started to be dangerous, when Russian troops were only 40 kilometres away, we moved to Kiev in the summer of 2022. Zaporizhzhia has a lot of industrial factories and they were getting bombed every day, so we moved.”
Back then, Stepanenko could still go back to his village, which remained in Ukrainian hands. Not now.
“Now all my friends have left the village, to move to the west part of Ukraine or Kiev,” he says. “My mother is living in Kiev.”
There’s another reason Stepanenko is emotional.
“I’ve been at Shakhtar for 15 years and today is my last day. I thought a lot about how I can compare this feeling. It’s like when someone leaves their family to go to university. It’s the start of a new life, a new experience but you’ll be separating from your family.”
He’s 35 but is not ready to hang up his boots.
“I’ve not played a lot in the last half year. I started playing football because I loved the game and the feeling around it, like when you arrive at the stadium. I want to play football again, to feel the passion, the courage. So I’ll move to Turkish team Eyüpspor in the Super Lig coached by Arda Turan. They want me to bring experience and a winning mentality to the team.
"The team play in Istanbul, where there are direct flights to my family. Since the war started my family moved from Ukraine to Bucharest – a former Shakhtar coach, Mircea Lucescu, helped us – and then to Malaga. It’s difficult for my wife to be alone with our children. She needs support and I’d like to provide that.”
What has it been like playing football while his country is at war?
“It was difficult after the war started,” he says. “Every day you would read the news and every day you would be upset. Football didn’t matter. Even when I went to the pitch all I thought about was the war, the refugees. I cried every time I played in the changing room.
“Shakhtar tried to help people. We wore T-shirts to remember the names of the towns that had been destroyed. We invited children who had lost their families because of bombs. These emotions went deep in my heart.
“And I knew people who were fighting. My close friend has just retired because he has a lot of injuries. He’s still in the army but not on the frontline. He was a successful businessman before the war. He told me a lot of stories about how you feel when you are face-to-face with the enemy.
“Everyone knows somebody who has died. At Shakhtar we have two goalkeepers. One recently lost his father fighting near my village, the other lost his brother. But it’s not just Shakhtar. In Dynamo Kiev there are players whose relatives have died. We are rivals but only in a sporting sense. We have the same problem, the same enemy together. I feel that we are on the same team for our country. I play for the national team with players from Dynamo Kiev, I’ve become close friends with the players my age.”
Midfielder Stepanenko will carry on. He’s lean, fit, intelligent and a current international. He has much to give football and much to look back on.
“I’ve played against all the big teams: Portugal, Spain, France, England,” he says. “[Luka] Modric is the best I’ve played against. I don’t like to play against Croatia, they’re a strange team. They can play a bad game, but two minutes from the end Modric can take the ball, make an assist, they score and win. It seemed that every time I played against Croatia it was like this. I played in amazing stadiums. The noise at Celtic and Fenerbahce – and PSV recently too.”
It's pleasant to talk about football and not war with Stepanenko, but conflict is never far away.
“I hope that Shakhtar return to Donetsk one day, but it’s very complicated,” he says. "We have a beautiful stadium, but Shakhtar moved from Donetsk in 2015 and already 11 years have passed.”
The National is spending a few days inside the Shakhtar Donetsk camp ahead of a Uefa Champions League match in Dortmund, one of football’s biggest and most atmospheric stadiums. The crowd of 81,365 is the biggest attendance in world football so far this year. Dortmund is not a city which could live without its football team; Donetsk is a city which has learned to live without their main team.
It’s an away game, the final one of eight in the newly formatted tournament. Shakhtar have spent a lot of time in Germany since they play their home Champions League games in Gelsenkirchen. They have have won two of their seven games and there’s a slim chance they can qualify, but one defeat at PSV Eindhoven stings. Shakhtar led 2-0 after 87 minutes, despite losing a player to a red card on 69 minutes. They lost 3-2. Had they won, they’d be in a far better position of making the play-offs going into the game against Dortmund.
We stay in the team hotel and watch training the night before the game in front of the vast Yellow Wall, the biggest standing terrace in football. And we speak to key people at the club.
“May 16, 2014,” says Darijo Srna when asked when he last visited Donetsk. “The last day in my home. We bought a house; my family was there. And we left everything – cars, house, clothes. Friends who are still there. We’d won the championship a few days before we left. On May 21 they started to bomb Donetsk airport.”
Srna, 42, is Croatian, but he’s a legendary Shakhtar player and now he’s the club's sports director, working for a club who play their domestic games in a country at war.
“This is my third war,” he says, shaking his head in disbelief. “I was in Croatia [the 1990s Balkan conflict], 2014 in Donetsk and now. I joke to my wife that I will move to Moscow so a war can start there. War is the worst thing that can happen in the world. The life of human beings doesn’t matter like it did before. It’s disgusting. How many children are without a parent? How many people have lost their lives?”
Srna played 536 games for Shakhtar over a 16-year period after joining from Hadjuk Split in 2003. He also played 134 times for that Croatia side that managed to get under Stepanenko’s skin so much. He was Croatia’s most capped player until being overtaken by Modric in 2021.
“I had a lot of offers to go, but my heart is at Shakhtar,” he says to explain why he stayed so long. “I arrived when I was 21. We started to build. We won the Uefa Cup and opened the stadium in 2009. We passed the Champions League group with Braga, Arsenal and Partizan. Amazing. We got to the quarter-final against Barcelona. Then war started in 2014 and it became more complicated, but we’ve had some top players: Fernandinho, Fred, Willian, Douglas Costa, Alex Teixeira, Luiz Adriano, [Henrikh] Mkhitaryan, [Mykhailo] Mudryk.”
Many of those are Brazilian, since Shakhtar’s policy has long been to sign talented young Brazilians to supplement domestic talent. Brazilians have also realised healthy transfer fees, helping Shakhtar to maintain their status as the strongest team in Eastern Europe, while the €70 million (potentially rising to €100 million) for Ukrainian winger Mudryk’s transfer to Chelsea in 2023 remains their record sale. They’re a savvy and well-run club, but their whole existence is a challenge as they try to survive amid the conflict.
“It’s difficult and I’m not just a sports director,” explains Srna. “I’m a friend, a father, a mother and a brother. There are plenty of young players here from Brazil. It’s hard to convince them to play in a country where there’s war. And when you do convince them, you put pressure on yourself because you never know what will happen in Ukraine – whether [Russia President Vladimir] Putin will send hundreds of rockets or one rocket.
“But Shakhtar’s history helps convince them. We play Champions League football; we buy and sell good players. We are strong, we must be because we don’t play at home, we don’t have our stadium, we don’t have fans at our domestic games.”
Those fans are now living all around the world. “We want to unite them, to bring joy. We try to send positive emotions to our fans – even the ones fighting. We get a lot of messages from soldiers. Sometimes they just want to see 90 minutes of unbelievable football, to give them a break. We hope this war will finish as soon as possible so that we can have peace. And then it will be amazing.”
For now, there’s only the grim reality. Shakhtar make donations to supporters, they send messages and football shirts, they’ve started a football side for amputees – and there’s sadly no shortage of players given the injuries from the war. The team are call Men of Steel.
Then there’s the men’s first team.
“We lost 14 players at the start of the war – Fifa took them from us,” explains Srna. “Fifa should protect the club and the players, not destroy the club and the players. Fifa didn’t even want to listen to us, I felt like they only want to listen to the top clubs. Uefa were completely different and tried to help us, but football is amazing. We have beaten Barcelona [in 2023] and Brest [in 2025], we deserve respect.”
Despite the changes, there’s still a stability at Shakhtar. The owner has stayed the same, the CEO Sergei Palkin too. Srna and Stepanenko show that longevity at the club is not rare, but they exist in stasis, the families of players and officials living away. They visit when Shakhtar play in Western Europe. The National witnesses this before the game against Dortmund. It’s akin to a prison visit, except the prisoners are innocent, some of only the very few males allowed to leave Ukraine to play football, then enjoy fleeting moments with loved ones. The wife of the Bosnian coach Marino Pusic acts like a motherly figure, offering smiles and hugs.
“It’s been difficult for everyone, especially those who’ve played for the last three years,” says Palkin. “The stress of the logistics, flights, buses. They don’t have normal lives. They are living away from their families; they don’t go home after training. I see them become tired, yet at the same time we have the same goals as we try to get better.”
But what is the reality, since the Ukrainian domestic league continues against such a problematic backdrop?
“We travelled to one game in the east of the country not far from the front line,” one player tells The National. “The original hotel we planned to stay in had been bombed.
"The game started quite late which was a risk as games can’t finish too late – there’s a curfew from midnight until 5am. The game took five hours because of three air raid alarms. You get a three-minute warning if you’re in Kiev, but it’s about one minute near to the front line. With each warning you go inside a shelter for 30 minutes. Or one hour if a plane has been spotted. I wasn’t scared, but we had to go into shelters. The crazy thing is that the fans just wanted autographs, they’re used to the warnings. The game was finally suspended so we had to travel back nine hours through the night to Kiev by bus, then play the final 35 mins of the game later.”
Long exiled to the western city of Lviv, Shakhtar have played Champions League games in Germany since 2022.
“The German market is big for us,” says Palkin. “There are Ukrainian refugees in Germany, Germans like football and we play in stadiums where there has been no recent Champions League football. In Hamburg we averaged 43,000, in Gelsenkirchen 35,000. It’s important that we are supported because players need to play in front of fans – they don’t do that in Ukraine.”
“We continue our philosophy and we like the Brazilian players – it’s like football theatre watching them,” says Palkin. “We are negotiating for a striker and a winger, but it’s also important for us to sell players as it’s an important source of income.
“And we are developing a new strategy on how we’ll develop in the future, while considering that there’s a war. It’s difficult for us to plan to increase our income in Ukraine during war and the current economic situation, but we can earn money abroad in Europe playing Champions League games. These revenues are crucial to us. We must play group stage every season and if we didn’t there would be a very big financial impact on us.
“This season we must do our best to win the [Ukrainian] championship but even then there is no guarantee, you must go through qualifying games.”
Shakhtar Donetsk CEO
For now, Shakhtar move around like a travelling circus – without the fun. The whole apparatus of an elite team: coaches, support staff, media, directors have to accompany the players. And every one of them has their story to tell, like the time they saw an enemy drone in Kiev or how the air raid warnings work on their mobile phones. With a winter break in the Ukrainian domestic league, they’ve spent much of the last few months in warmer, safer Turkey, playing friendly games to be match fit for the Champions League. The Brazilian players bring the skills and the smiles, the wins too.
“It’s just difficult,” adds Palkin. “When you are successful you enjoy it but when you are not then it’s difficult to survive with these kinds of conditions. When people in Ukraine are watching a game and they see the players are giving 100 per cent, this is important. They feel it, they respect it.”
Shakhtar lose 3-1 to Dortmund to miss out on a Champions League play-off. Domestic competition resumes in March, when they must close a 10-point gap to the leaders Dynamo Kiev, though they have a game in hand as they try to win a third successive domestic title and a 15th this century. Then they hope to get back into the Champions League, not that they know where they’ll end up playing.
