Ukrainian club Shakhtar Donetsk reach out to wounded soldiers and war orphans

PARIS – Shakhtar Donetsk’s objectives used to be confined to silverware, but now the storied Ukrainian football club has loftier aims, financing hospital care abroad for wounded soldiers and finding new homes for orphans.

The club – whose lifting of the 2009 Uefa Cup makes them one of only two Ukrainian teams to win a European club competition – has through its foundation Shakhtar Social spared no expense since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

It has paid €100,000 (S$146,200) each for five severely wounded soldiers to be sent for medical treatment in hospitals in Israel, the United States and Spain.

“You cannot imagine what injuries they have,” Shakhtar chief executive officer Sergey Palkin told AFP in a phone interview.

“Two of them are paralysed, others suffered catastrophic wounds in a rocket detonation...

“We want to give them a chance of a normal life. These hospitals have very sophisticated procedures.

“The families cannot sustain those expenses and the government has no capability to provide this financial help, so we are taking care of them.”

Children have suffered too amid the death and destruction. Some have been killed, some have been left as orphans and others have been forcibly taken to Russia.

“We have looked after 31 children, who lost their parents due to the war and we have found them 17 families,” said Palkin.

“We provide living expenses, medical treatments, iPads and try to normalise the situation from a psychological point of view.”

Shakhtar’s Ukrainian international defender Ivan Petryak knows what it is like to lose a family member.

His father-in-law Ivan Petrenko was killed in action in Donbas last May.

“The guys who were with him saw him die,” Petryak told AFP.

“For us as a family, it is the worst situation as we cannot find the body and we cannot have the funeral to say goodbye.”

Shakhtar have bitter experience of what it is like to be displaced. They hosted matches in the 2012 European Championship, but two years later they were on the move after Russia seized Crimea.

They played in Kyiv before the war and are now in Lviv.

Little did they realise they would play host to more refugees from the Donbas region eight years later as the Russian army swept in once again.

“We accepted more than 2,000 refugees from the eastern part of Ukraine,” said Palkin.

“We provide food, medical treatment, including psychological treatment, helping people to concentrate on what they should do regarding their next steps.”

Petryak said he cannot envisage a scenario where he takes to a pitch in the future against a Russian team. “They are like zombies,” he added of the Russian players and their support of President Vladimir Putin.

Equally, he is dumbfounded that International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach has left the door open for Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete in the 2024 Olympics in Paris.

He said: “More than 200 athletes have been killed and he wants to say Russia and Belarus are allowed at the Olympic Games...

“It is unbelievable. For me, it is a bit of a circus.” AFP