Shakhtar Donetsk’s players went through their paces under low, wispy cloud on the morning before another journey, a light session for those who had not started the previous day’s match against Veres Rivne. Arda Turan watched from the side with the club’s director of football, Darijo Srna, and for a few minutes the scene at a spa hotel base 15 minutes outside Lviv could have belonged to almost any Champions League club. It does not. Around dawn, air raid sirens had broken the quiet, and in Rivne, three hours’ drive to the north-east, another alarm had sent players and staff down to the stadium shelter, delaying the second half by 20 minutes. Whichever corner of the country they are in, that is a weekly reality.
So is a travel schedule that would make most other Champions League clubs recoil. There remains no chance of Shakhtar playing European games in Ukraine, and this season they will stage their ‘home’ fixtures in England for the first time, with Stamford Bridge winning a beauty contest of three venues in London. Wednesday’s game at home to AEK Athens is the first of them. The club has grown used to packing up and taking its roadshow to Poland, Germany and Slovakia for continental home matches, but the routine does not become any easier, and with parts of Ukraine under intensified attack from Russia there is no immediate prospect of a happy ending. If the border crossing into Poland is unforgiving, the trip can take anything up to 18 hours.
The mechanics of it are punishing. The squad leaves in a convoy of people carriers, four or five players to a vehicle — a concession to comfort introduced a year ago after a favourable response — with other employees following on a larger coach. The Krakovets border crossing is reached in just under two hours, and formalities on the Ukrainian and Polish sides take an hour and a quarter. On one occasion a young immigration official demanded that all of Shakhtar’s vehicles be emptied and searched one by one. From Lviv it is four hours to Rzeszow airport, where there are shirts to sign for a handful of supporters who have caught wind of the team’s presence, and then a two-and-a-half-hour chartered flight to Gatwick. All told, a nine-hour expedition, after which the squad is settled into its west London hotel within 90 minutes. One player discovered at the airport that his electronic travel authorisation to enter the UK had not worked, the system apparently misreading the name on his passport; a rushed reapplication secured his passage half an hour before boarding.
Turan, appointed head coach in May 2025, has thrown himself into the club. “It’s an iconic stadium but it’s not our home,” he said of Stamford Bridge. “If you don’t have a home stadium at this level it’s very difficult, ask any other club. But we have a dream and inside we have great power.” He has also been reminding anyone who will listen of his semi-final goal against Chelsea in 2014, when an Atlético Madrid side at the peak of its powers produced a classic away performance — a piece of history that Alisson, one of Shakhtar’s forwards, had been unaware of and has been made to learn quickly.
Vitaliy Khlivnyuk, Shakhtar’s director of sports management, describes an accumulated toll. “In the first year playing games away we felt more enthusiastic, and we continue, but with each year it becomes harder and harder for everyone,” he said. “It’s like if you didn’t sleep for one day, you can recover. You didn’t sleep for two, you already feel worse. The third, it’s something else. It accumulates. Physically you can get over it but mentally it’s really tough.” He half-jokes that his office has become a “panic room” for the endless last-minute hitches of running a club in wartime. The day’s quandary: Shakhtar need new residency permits for their foreign players and staff, but the application system has been taken offline by Russian bombs in Kyiv. Kyiv, where the club was based more regularly until three years ago, is an increasingly dangerous place — Khlivnyuk says the birds no longer sing there, drawing an unhappy parallel with the early days of the invasion of Donetsk in 2014. Domestic matches are still played in the capital, but the entire league may soon need relocating to the west of the country.
For the Brazilian contingent, who make up a large part of the squad, the travel has simply become normal. “Before I came here I didn’t know about this travel situation, but it’s just something we have to do,” said Kauã Elias, among the brightest of Shakhtar’s modern crop of Brazilians. “It’s normal now. My friends always want to know how it is for me playing in a country with a war, but this bus travel is the only real difference. Having so many other Brazilians for company helps a lot.” In Lviv they meet once a week to cook churrasco, with Marlon Gomes the most adept at it. Stamford Bridge carries its own pull: “Since I was a kid I dreamed of playing there for Chelsea,” Elias said. “So going there with Shakhtar is a dream in the same way. We’re very happy to play in London this year.” Newertton, another of the Brazilians, is unfazed by the journey. The club’s bus driver, Oleksandr, has long since lost count of the miles accrued in two and a half years on the payroll, but remembers travelling 930 miles to Slovenia for a Conference League game last season; on one trip Shakhtar were held up at the border for eight hours.
Shakhtar hope at least 25,000 fans will attend the AEK fixture, perhaps the lowest-profile home match of a quartet that will conclude with Real Madrid’s visit in January. The club’s ties to London extend beyond football: Metinvest, its sister company, provided 5,000 tonnes of steel that built the Shard, the capital’s tallest building. On the pitch they will wear shirts highlighting the “Invest in Ukraine” campaign driven by their owner and sponsor, SCM. There is genuine hope of progress to the playoff round after a useful draw at PSV Eindhoven on the opening matchday, and Srna framed the wider stakes. “If you come along and support Shakhtar, you’re supporting Ukraine,” he said. “This team need support and need emotion, because we are living under sirens and bombs. We’re here to show the world that we are alive, strong, united and will fight to the end.”
Srna also put the fixture list in perspective: nine games in 29 days, three of them in the Champions League, with the journey home to be made as well. “It’s a very difficult thing to understand if you don’t experience it with us,” he said. At the back of the plane, Shakhtar’s Ukrainian players passed the time with cards. “On some of these long trips I feel like a squished lemon by the end of the day,” said the midfielder Dmytro Kryskiv. “But there are others that are easier and this feels like one of them, travelling to Stamford Bridge for the Champions League.” The return comes on Thursday, before preparation for Saturday’s league game with Kolos Kovalivka. “We have to continue to play,” Khlivnyuk said. “Many of our citizens are struggling more than us. When you know that a win or draw can be a spot of light in this darkness, you will always do it.”