‘I cry every day’: in the stands with Ukrainians as Dynamo Kyiv play again

Far away, at the other end of the pitch, a Ukrainian footballer is scoring what later turns out to have been a beautifully worked goal. That is something remarkable in itself but Oksana is talking and the backdrop has become a detail. She is thinking about the train she will board in around nine hours; it will return her to Kyiv, at last, and from there she will join the volunteer effort in Bucha. The home she left is 10 miles further south, in Boyarka. Like most of the capital’s satellite towns, it has undergone its own visit to hell.

“Tomorrow they are burying one more of my friends, but I won’t make it in time,” she says. “Many have gone already and I have no idea whether I will ever see many more of them again. Two close friends were killed while they were helping to evacuate people. They were found in a mass grave with evidence that they were tortured. And I know that there is more of this to come.”

Oksana’s story drowns out the clamour of a football game. It is delivered matter-of-factly and with what she describes as a necessary distance. “My mind is just trying to reject the reality,” she says. “I just disconnect my feelings. It’s going to come later, I’m aware.”

She has wrapped herself in a Ukraine flag and is far from alone in that. At a safe estimate about two-thirds of an 18,000 crowd inside Legia Warsaw’s stadium are her compatriots. Some live here; many have arrived through necessity. All of them are processing, or will one day be faced with handling, grief that is at once collective and intensely personal. They are nominally here to watch Dynamo Kyiv play the host club in the first of a “match for peace” series that will raise money for the response to Russia’s invasion and see them face several other