Brdo smells like spring. The air blowing from the Slovenian Alps seems fresh and clean, the silence broken only by the chirping of birds and the distant church bells. Dmitry Riznyk looks at three excellent areas; just behind him is a small stand artfully placed on a bright grassy mound. The football scene is rarely more idyllic, but for those working here this week, the beauty is drowned out by the constant, quiet, harsh sound.

“When I return to my country and there is no war there, I will find peace again,” said Riznyk, one of the four goalkeepers, at the beginning of Ukraine’s first training session after the Russian invasion. “We are here and my heart is there. We believe in those who protect us and we will win. When that happens, the fear will go away.”

However, when it was time to leave, Riznyk was ready. He spent the first four days of the war at his parents’ house in Poltava, where he played for Vorskla with his wife and newborn son. Leaving them was the hardest test, but on April 30, he joined the national team headquarters on a 20-hour bus ride from Kiev to their new base.

Most of his 22 colleagues represent Dynamo Kyiv and Shakhtar Donetsk; they played charity matches abroad and were able to fly to Slovenia, but Riznyk is an exception. The rest of the Ukrainian clubs more or less suspended their activities, so between trips to the bomb shelter and the haunting howl of sirens, he trained alone for almost two months to prepare for the performance at the World Cup. “We hope to glorify our country and also bring joy to our people.”

Ukraine will face Wales if they beat Scotland in the play-off semi-finals next month; Winning two matches guarantees a trip to Qatar. In a tournament held in the shadows, their presence would be a beam of light. “I don’t put pressure on them, it’s very difficult,” says coach Alexander Petrakov. “I never expected to work in such conditions.”

Petrakov was 64 years old and thought he had seen everything. Unlike Riznyk, he says a sense of calm enveloped him as the bus crossed the Ukraine-Hungary border: There were no big queues at gas stations due to dwindling fuel supplies, and “my, maybe, you forgot”.

He admits that a bit of calming down while he physically prepares his players for two intense playoffs will be the toughest test of his career. “I try to make jokes, tell them interesting stories from football and life, to cheer them up,” the coach says.

Petrakov speaks with dry humor, but an hour spent watching the training of the Ukrainian national team – in a quiet session shortly after the arrival of the Dynamo unit – confirms his tactfulness and ease of communication. “It’s important to distract players from bad thoughts, but on the other hand, we all know that people die for Ukraine. While the whole country is waiting for a piece of happiness, they should keep it in their minds and hearts. We must do this for them together.”

Petrakov, in his own words, is worried that his players won’t be able to do their best in friendlies, and he knows there is little time to reach a competitive pace. Its foreign players, including Oleksandr Zinchenko and Andriy Yarmolenko, should be in better shape, but by the end of May. On Wednesday, Ukraine will play a friendly match against Borussia Mönchengladbach, but will need a few more tough tests before hitting the Hampden Park pitch. Tough times but they hope to face at least one African team before the end of the month.

Any benefit of football may seem obscure at best, yet the horrors in the world are very real. That’s why it’s surprising to hear veteran defender Taras Stepanenko, speaking in a pastel-white room overlooking the training facility, explain that the team receives messages from soldiers at the front every day. They have only one request: ‘Please do your best to go to the World Cup’. “For the country, for them, this will be a moment of hope and a feast. That’s why we shouldn’t just play football as usual; We have to play with our souls, with our hearts.”

Perhaps this is sport in its purest form: Russia has hardly concealed its intention to erase Ukrainian culture from the face of the earth, and the football team is one of the clear manifestations of the heart, craft, creativity of the country. . Playing football in the highest arena is, on the one hand, a manifestation of disobedience, on the other hand, an act of protection and maintenance.

This idea was brought up again in a conversation with Dinamo midfielder Sergei Sidorchuk, another young veteran, 31, who has played 47 times. Sidorchuk played in his club’s charity matches and a different image formed in his mind. Before Dinamo played Legia in Warsaw last month, they visited a redesigned factory to house Ukrainian refugees. The players handed out toys and sweets to children who had run away with their mother or grandparents: one of them was a seven-year-old boy, and Sidorchuk, opening the photo gallery on his phone, shows the image presented to him.

The scene is heartbreaking: the boy’s drawing, which is goosebumps and vivid, shows burning houses with the Russian flag flying over them. “It’s hard to see, very difficult,” Sidorchuk says. “I hope he lives a normal life in the future and has everything he wants. But I think a broken or wounded heart will remain.” Qualifying for the World Cup may at least inspire happier ways to express yourself.

Given the freedom of movement, Ukrainian football players are in a positive state. “When you see people who have lost everything and you have something, it’s a very shocking moment,” Sidorchuk says, “but the Dynamo and Shakhtar players still learned about the practical consequences of the Russian invasion.

In the early days of the occupation, he and his family, including his wife, who was pregnant at the time, spent two days and two nights under blankets in the parking lot beneath their house. They were joined by their national teammates Serhiy Kryvtsov, Andriy Pyatov and Mykola Matvienko. The nearest airport in Zhuliany was bombed, and the windows in their apartments were blown away by the blast wave. Others suffered more severely, but when he revisits his archive to show his children sleeping in the open trunk of a car, it turns out that everyone here carries their own trauma with them. “This isn’t just a training camp,” he says. “Everything is different now. It’s a very heavy feeling.”

Raw anger is also behind the professionalism and methodical description of his experience as a traveling group from Ukraine. Petrakov expresses this most strongly: perhaps he feels more confident than anyone else. In addition to Russia’s suspension from the World Cup and a seasonal ban from participation in European competitions, she wants Russia to be punished more severely in sporting terms.

“They should be suspended for at least five years,” he says. They must pay the price for their support of Putin. They are killing our women, our children, they are destroying our cities, so they have no right to compete in sports. If we do not stop their aggression, they will come to other parts of Europe. It’s not a peaceful country, so they have to pay for it in sports.”

Riznyk talks about the voluntary help of his Vorskla comrades, who returned to group training, to hospitals and refugees; Sydorchuk describes how his parents and relatives in Zaporozhye, the first relatively safe place for those who managed to escape from Mariupol, fed the newcomers. The energy and love spent on sustaining life across the country is incomprehensible.

“We’re all united in this,” says Sidorchuk. “If you’re a journalist, do your journalism job. If you are a football player, play football for your country. If you are an ordinary worker, you can work. Because we have a professional army, we have military volunteers who can fight. But we are all together and that is very important.”

The message is that in the worst of circumstances, you have to show your best. For Ukrainians in Slovenia who train in front of billboards advertising Lvoovskoe beer and other homemade products, this means carrying the stick all the way to Doha. “We need to win our games,” says Riznyk.

As night falls and the sandflies outside remind him that the season brings its own little annoyances, Petrakov wonders if the mission he never wanted has become his destiny. “I’m at the age where I want nothing: no house, no car,” she says. But if I take the team to Qatar, it means I haven’t lived my life in vain.”

Nick AmesThe Guardian