A group of Brazilians who play for Ukrainian sides Shakhtar Donetsk and Dynamo Kyiv are looking for help from the Brazilian government, saying Thursday they have no way to leave Ukraine amid Russia’s ongoing invasion of the country.
Around a dozen players and their families sought refuge in a hotel in Kyiv shortly after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declared martial law across the eastern European nation.
Forty-one Brazilians currently play in Ukraine, with 31 in the first division and 13 representing Shakhtar Donetsk, a club that has a history of fielding teams with many Brazilian players.
“Here we are all gathered, Dynamo and Shakhtar players, with our families, staying here at the hotel because of the situation,” Marlon Santos, one of Shakhtar’s defenders, said in an Instagram video translated by theScore. “We are here asking for your help due to the lack of conditions that exist in the city, closed borders, closed airspace. There’s no way we can get out. We ask for a lot of support from the government of Brazil, which can help us.”
One of the Brazilian women in the video added: “We women are with our children, and feeling a little abandoned. We don’t know what to do, nothing comes to us. We appeal to you, even for the sake of the children. Each one left the house running to come to the hotel.”
Shakhtar haven’t played in their hometown of Donetsk since Russian-backed separatists sparked an uprising in the area in 2014. The club hosted games in Lviv and Kharkiv before migrating to the Olympic National Sports Complex in Kyiv in 2020.
Paulo Fonseca, who coached Shakhtar from 2016-19, is also stuck in Ukraine with his Ukrainian wife and family. He said he woke up to the sound of five explosions at 5 a.m. local time Thursday morning.
“I had a flight scheduled for today, but now it’s impossible to get out of here, especially because the airports are already destroyed and the airspace has been closed,” Fonseca told Portuguese outlet Jornal de Noticias.
“Right now, you can only get out of Kyiv by land and everyone is trying to escape to Lviv, a city close to Poland. The roads are completely stopped because it’s impossible to get around with so many cars. There’s no gasoline. All we can do is pray that a bomb doesn’t fall on us. Honestly, I don’t know how I’m going to get out of here.”
Shakhtar’s current manager, Roberto De Zerbi, said the same explosions woke him up, and he’s trying to find a way out of the country now that the Ukrainian Premier League – which has been on a two-month winter break – has been suspended indefinitely.
“Am I afraid? There are many worries, but I think about my family in Brescia who are worried,” De Zerbi told Sky Sport Italia. “The same goes for my players. They see me as the older one who should protect them, but I find it hard to tell them what to do. Some are very young.”
