'We are alive': Mariupol footballers stay strong as season begins

Ukraine's football season kicked off on Tuesday despite the ongoing Russian invasion, players from a Mariupol club are hoping to do their devastated city proud after a dramatic escape from their home. FSC Mariupol are warming up in the tiny village stadium of Demydiv 20 kilometres (12 miles) north of Kyiv -- hundreds of kilometres from their base in the strategic port hub on the Sea of Azov. Oleksandr Yaroshenko, the club's president, told AFP that he motivates the team's players by telling them: "You don't just play football.

You have to play because we are Mariupol." Yaroshenko remembers that the club played a friendly two days before the February 24 invasion. Nobody at the time believed Russia would attack. Two days later, the first bombs fell on the city and Russian forces surrounded it within days.

When electricity and running water began to be cut off at the beginning of March due to the constant shelling, players and coaches began to converge on the club's base in the city centre. Yaroshenko, who also owns a medical business, said he volunteered to coordinate medical facilities in the city -- which has seen some of the most intense fighting in the past six months of war. Yaroshenko initially asked the players to leave on a club bus -- a big black coach with the inscription "Mariupol" above the windshield parked metres from the stadium.

But, not wanting to leave their relatives or fearing to come under fire along the way, most of the players refused to flee. Only a week later, the players and their relatives eventually decided to go. "Our aim was to get out of Mariupol.