Frontline football: ‘We try to show the same fight as the Ukrainian soldiers fighting for us’

Celtic Park in Glasgow is among the most partisan football grounds in Europe – you don’t want to be on the wrong end of this crowd. But Celtic fans know the world, and last September was different: home supporters lined the approach to the stadium, to greet and applaud the visitors’ coach as it arrived for a big night in the Champions League. Aboard it: Shakhtar Donetsk, the Ukrainian champions who had not played a game at home for nine years, since Russian separatists and armed forces occupied their city in 2014.

The crowd cheered the bus, and – poignantly – among the home fans’ Irish tricolours were flags of blue and yellow, those of Ukraine, waved by a group of children – refugees from the war that ravages their homeland, now settled in Glasgow.

Among them were two sisters from north-eastern Ukraine, Bohdana and Nevena, whose village of Balakliia was overrun by Russian forces early in the present war. Their road here had been a hard one, but that night their smiles were radiant: “I love these boys,” said Nevena, “I wonder whether I’ll see my home again – but when Shakhtar play, we are all like back there together.”

In wartime, Shakhtar has become a standard-bearer beyond the team’s illustrious history and prowess on the pitch wherever they play, but also for the country they have come to represent – its noble cause and just war. Shakhtar is now Ukraine FC, and Refugee FC, even in their own land.

And now their fans are refugees, too, both within the Ukrainian Premier League, which defiantly proceeds, or scattered across the diaspora, to watch Shakhtar compete at the apex of European football.

Domestic league matches are now played in empty stadiums for security reasons. Since the Russians occupied Donetsk, along with