A tent set up with wood and canvas, covered with camouflage nets, is the auditorium in which six men and one woman watched Ukraine’s debut in the Euro Cup. A plasma screen hangs from one of the woods and a computer is connected to it to broadcast the game. The connection is constantly lost and the hard-falling rain seeps everywhere. But none of this matters because they are used to it: they are Ukrainian soldiers on the Zaporizhia front.
“It’s better for the connection to go away, for what it’s worth,” exclaims Volodímir, a soldier from the 108th Brigade of the Territorial Defense Forces, when Romania scores 3 to 0. Volodímir is from Dnipro and his favorite player on the national team is Artem Dovbyk, the Girona forward, because a good part of his career was played in clubs in his city. “It’s just a game, nothing happens,” Kipish said with 2-0 down. Kipish is the code name of a 35-year-old soldier who had been a midfielder for Metalurg Mariupol. His father had defended the colors of Shakthar Donetsk and evokes the Mariupol of his childhood, in which there were soccer fields in every neighborhood and three professional clubs. All that has been left in the past after the Russian army devastated his city and occupied it in 2022.
Kipish and Volodímir are the most fans of this sport of the group that has gathered to follow the game. In their battalion they have two former football club ultras, they say, but at the time of the match they are on duty defending front-line positions in neighboring Orijiv. For the rest, football is the least important thing: the match is an excuse to disconnect from the war for a couple of hours. The event for the Euro Cup is held in the yard of a farm in the rear, 20 kilometers from the front line of the fighting. The farm is a communications center for the brigade. Between boxes of ammunition, rifles and tourniquets, the tent is used for meetings, to plan military operations or for something as exceptional as watching football.
Maluk is the nom de guerre of a 23-year-old young man who serves as deputy commander of an artillery company. He admits that it is the first football game he has ever seen in his life because boxing is his thing. “Boxing is the most popular thing in Ukraine, we have champions like Klitchkó, Oleksandr Usyk, Gvozdyk or Berinchyk,” explains Maluk, “I don’t see football as something serious, boxing does, because we are a country of fighters, no. “We have had another remedy, we have always had enemies.” Next to him is Tatiana, 27 years old, a soldier since March and assistant to the brigade’s military chaplain. She confirms that she is not a soccer fan but that she feels proud of her national team: “she shows that despite the war we are a country that can compete.” Dima, press officer of the 108th Brigade, acknowledges that she found out a few days ago that Ukraine would play in the European Championship. “A Norwegian journalist told me this, who asked me if there were football fans in our sniper unit; Neither I nor the boys understood why he asked us.”
In a society so focused today on its collective identity, with so many flags and national proclamations on the streets and in the media, it is striking that there are hardly any posters on public roads that have taken advantage of the team’s classification to unite the population. The fatigue in society after more than two years of war is taking its toll, also in the army. Maxim, spokesperson for the 93rd Mechanized Brigade, commented on June 8 to this newspaper in Kostiantinivka, one of the fronts in the province of Donetsk, that participation in the Euro Cup was “another way for the world to keep Ukraine in mind.” but he had doubts about whether it could be an injection of collective self-esteem: “I’m not sure that the Euro Cup is going to be a general motivating factor. The soldiers are so tired that many would not even want to go home to disconnect, it would be too big a change from what they are experiencing here.”
“It’s just a game,” Kipish repeats while grabbing a handful of popcorn that one of his teammates brought during halftime. With the score at 3 to 0, half an hour before the game ended, the soldiers decided to end the evening. Will you see your team’s next match? They do not know it, first they must know if it coincides with hours of rest or combat. “There are more important victories,” Kipish, the former Metalurg Mariupol player, reflected to close the day. His club no longer exists and he cannot return to his city either: now he fights so that his country does not follow the same path.
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