The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Watching in a war zone
In Ukraine, fighting slows as matches go on.
AVDIIVKA, UKRAINE — Headquarters for the 2nd Battalion of the 92nd Brigade of the Ukrainian army is in a pummeled building that once housed the district road repair agency. War has left the building in even worse shape than the roads. At the entrances, sandbags and tires are stacked in fortification. Logs reinforce the basement ceiling against the shelling.
In the command center, a quarter mile from the front line of a simmering conflict, troop locations are shown on one television. There are blue triangles for the Ukrainian military, red diamonds for the Russian-backed separatists. A second television shows surveillance from cameras placed along the firing zone.
On Thursday evening, a third television tracked Russians, but these happened to be members of the country’s national soccer team playing the opening match of the World Cup in Moscow.
A peculiar and fragile normalcy has returned to the mining and steel region of eastern Ukraine after four years of fighting that has taken roughly 10,300 lives and displaced about 1.5 million people. Low-grade skirmishes continue daily, and people are still dying, but the Ukrainian military and the separatists have reached a treaty-enforced standstill, like boxers in a clinch.
On Thursday, for the first half anyway, the usual thud of nighttime shelling remained largely silent as some Ukrainian commanders, troops and townspeople watched Russia cruise to a 5-0 victory over Saudi Arabia, sports briefly distracting from politics and war.
Oleg A., 40, the Ukrainian commander of the 2nd Battalion, who like many soldiers declined to give his full name, turned the television to soccer more out of obligation than curiosity. He prefers Formula One auto racing.
“I don’t understand why 22 people run around with one ball,” he said.
A diversion from war
Ukraine did not qualify for this year’s World Cup. Still, some soldiers said that they looked forward to watching the matches, if disruptions caused by a blocked Ukrainian television channel and slow local internet service could be resolved.
“It unloads your brain,” said a soldier who gave his
name as Nikolai. “When you are in the trenches, you can watch a match and the way the ball is passed and you forget everything.”
Many international observers wondered before the World Cup whether fighting would escalate or calm down during the tournament. As the opener began, Oleg A., the battalion commander, led a Times reporter, photographer and translator along a 2-mile excursion of Ukrainian combat positions near the front line, to see if any of his troops were watching.
Graying and brawny, garrulous and darkly funny in the way of soldiers, Oleg A. carried an AK-47. The fields and forest felt empty, hushed.
“I don’t think there will be any shooting for two hours,” he said of the rebels. “Russia is playing. Everyone will be watching, 100 percent.”
Near a bunker along a weed-strewn, defended highway, Oleg A. encountered four of his soldiers. Two were filling sandbags. One of them, Aleksandr I., 27, said, “We love football but we don’t have the capacity to watch. The internet is too slow.”
Oleg A. laughed and said, “We will only hear it.”
He looked toward a rebel position just over a mile away. “If those guys will be shouting, everything will be fine,” he said.
Six years ago, Ukraine played co-host to the last major international soccer tournament held in the region, when it shared the 2012 European championships with Poland.
The industrial city of Donetsk — only a few miles from the Ukrainian positions — hosted five matches, including a semifinal. The atmosphere was festive back then. Acrobats walked outside the stadium on stilts. Security personnel carried riot helmets in the crook of their arms, like baskets
of flowers. A new airport opened for the tournament. The architectural tilt of Donbas Arena made it seem to lift off like a flying saucer.
But Donetsk is no longer controlled by the Ukrainian government. The city is rebel-held and the separatist area is known as the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic. The New York Times repeatedly requested permission to enter the rebel area during the World Cup but was denied.
Fighting here began in 2014, after Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, fled the country and separatist movements broke out in two eastern Ukrainian provinces. (Russia also annexed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea from Ukraine that year.) The airport in Donetsk was shelled to a husk. Donbas Arena was wounded, less seriously, by shrapnel.
Hard feelings
In most countries, soccer and politics are inextricably connected. Ukraine’s national public television network declined to broadcast the World Cup this year, saying it would amount to Russian propaganda. The Ukrainian soccer federation did not grant credentials to the country’s journalists or request its quota of tickets. There were calls by some politicians for a boycott.
But Ukrainians are passionate about soccer, and there is no comparable international sporting event between midJune and mid-July. Two other Ukrainian channels decided to broadcast the matches, and some 6,000 Ukrainian fans purchased tickets to attend games in Russia.
Still, Andriy Pavelko, president of the Ukrainian soccer federation, said that he would follow the matches only on Italian or British television. “We must have some moral restrictions,” he told reporters.