They won one battle, then sat back to watch a different kind of battle. Eight Ukrainian National Guard soldiers who helped hold off a Russian advance in Ukraine’s northern Kharkiv region took the afternoon off to watch the men’s national soccer team’s first match Monday. European Championships.
“Football brings people together — it’s an adrenaline rush that motivates everyone,” said Evhen, 34, a soldier in the 13th National Guard Brigade who asked to be identified only by his first name due to military regulations.
The soldiers huddled in bunkers, drinking soda and eating chips, to watch Ukraine play Romania in Munich. They were heartbroken when their team lost 3-0. But like most Ukrainians, they still feel a special pride for their wartime sports teams.
“We have one team on the field, and a million people on the front,” said Andriy Shevchenko, a former soccer star and Ukraine’s most famous player who is now the president of the national soccer federation. Like all Ukrainians, he said, “soccer players turn on their phones every morning to check what’s happening on the battlefield.”
For the National Guardsmen, who have been fighting side by side for more than a year, soccer offered a chance to unite and cheer on their national team as they huddled in their basement and watched Ukraine quickly fall behind Romania.
“In war, we look at things differently,” said one commander, nicknamed Jackson. “Even now, watching the game, we understand that at any moment we may have to leave the battlefield and go into battle. We are always ready.”
Football, he said, was important to Ukrainians, even during the war. “I’m convinced of that,” he said of those who supported football players and the military during the war. “We fought for the country, for the state.”
Ukrainian soldiers held off Russia’s advance for about 10 days last month when it launched a cross-border offensive north of Kharkiv, opening a new front in the war. They also pushed back Russian forces from a leading position in an urban combat zone in the town of Vovchansk.
Ukraine barely qualified for the tournament, with football almost completely disrupted by war and occupation, and needed to beat Iceland in a play-off on March 26 to reach the final. The match was held in Wroclaw, Poland, as Ukraine could not host the match on its own territory due to the threat of Russian missiles.
Ukraine has not had a home game since the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022. Since then, professional football players and countless fans who joined the army have been killed. Many football stadiums and other sports training grounds have also been destroyed by the war.
The Soniachinsky football stadium was severely damaged after being shelled in May 2022. At the beginning of the war, the Borodyanka football stadium in the north of the capital Kiev was occupied for a month and destroyed by Russian soldiers who dug a huge “V”-shaped trench across the entire field. Russian soldiers marked the letters “V” and “Z” on the tanks.
Oleksandr Tymchyk, who played in Monday’s match against Romania, lost a brother in August 2023 when he was killed in fighting in Donetsk Oblast.
Since February 2022, leagues from football’s global governing body FIFA and European governing body UEFA have imposed a ban on all Russian clubs and the national team.
Monday’s match was Ukraine’s fourth appearance at the European Championships. Ukraine first took part in the tournament in 2012, when it co-hosted the tournament with Poland and staged several games in the city of Donetsk before Russia occupied the city two years later.
But this year, most of the nearly one million soldiers in Ukraine’s army, national guard, paramilitary police and other forces were unable to watch. Some frontline soldiers watched via screens connected to batteries and satellite internet that also transmit artillery coordinates and other military data.
Unlike civilian fans, soldiers are prohibited from drinking alcohol.
“There’s a real lack of beer here,” Evan said. He said he misses his soccer-loving friends back home. “But I have a really good group of friends here too,” he added. “They’re all great.”
Ukraine hopes to use the tournament to draw international attention to the country’s plight, including that of its sports facilities.
Kharkiv is the region where the most sports facilities have been destroyed in the war. Ahead of a match in Munich on Monday, the Ukrainian Football Association showed off the badly damaged stands of the Soniachni Stadium at Munich’s Wittelsbacher Platz.
The Ukrainian national team also recorded a video showing rocket attacks on their hometowns. Some of the players are from occupied Donetsk and surrounding areas. Midfielder Mykola Shaparenko is from Velika Novosirka in the Donetsk region, which is now under Ukrainian control but was destroyed in the war.
Ukrainian sports news media and bars also used the momentum of the match to raise donations for the military. The Kiev beer bar Kutovy announced that it would auction off football player Nazar Voloshin’s T-shirt to raise funds for the 3rd Commando Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Ukraine will face Slovakia on Friday. In the group stage, teams will play three games to determine which team will advance to the knockout stage. This means Ukraine still has a chance to win.
The soldiers were saddened by their team’s defeat to Romania.
“Well, we’re all sad,” said Evan, a soldier with the 13th National Guard Brigade. “But the good thing is that no one’s life depended on it.”
Still, they joked that they had plenty of opportunities to vent their frustrations.
Commander Jackson said: “We will take a break with the soldiers and then continue to fire mortars until we win, and use this way to blow off some energy.”
