The legendary coach of Dynamo Kyiv Valery Lobanovsky is honored and remembered not only in Europe. The other day in Kuwait, events dedicated to the work of the Master in this country were held for three days. Recall that from 1994 to 1996 Lobanovsky headed the Kuwait national team.
Photo - Dynamo press serviceThe main event to which these events were timed was the publication of the first Arabic-language book about Valery Lobanovsky. This was the result of the initiative of the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ukraine to the State of Kuwait Oleksandr Balanutsa, who, among other things, made a proposal to Dynamo Kyiv President Igor Surkis.
Saleh Tarkavi became the author of the book about the Maitre, and on behalf of Dynamo, the project of its creation was supervised by the club's vice-president Alexei Semenenko, who had worked side by side with Valery Lobanovsky since 1989. He helped the creators of the book to streamline a number of data, as a result of which, in particular, the pages of the publication were decorated with appeals, photographs and autographs of outstanding students of Lobanovsky - the owners of the Golden Ball Oleg Blokhin, Igor Belanov and Andrey Shevchenko.
Aleksey Semenenko himself, as well as the famous FIFA referee Miroslav Stupar, were invited to the events dedicated to honoring Lobanovsky's sports heritage, among others.
As a result, all meetings and press conferences organized as part of the presentation of the book about Lobanovsky gathered a wide international audience. At the same time, a joint press conference of the Ambassador and the Ukrainian delegation was held at the Embassy of Ukraine in the State of Kuwait, which was attended by several leading Kuwaiti newspapers and TV channels, as well as local bloggers. As a result, 6 full-fledged interviews and informational messages were published in the Kuwaiti press, and many video materials are still being edited.
And the main event, at which the book about Lobanovsky was actually presented, was attended by more than 60 guests, including foreign ambassadors from more than 15 countries, journalists and football fans.
About how the events in Kuwait, dedicated to the presentation of the book about Lobanovsky, were told to our website Alexey Semenenko.
“The main initiator of the creation of such a book was indeed Alexander Balanutsa, who has been a Dynamo fan since childhood, and his grandmother was the school teacher of the Dynamo goalkeeper, and now the goalkeeping coach of the first team of the club, Mikhail Mikhailov. And when Balanutsa was on a diplomatic mission in the UAE, he opened a children's football academy there, which he named after Dynamo Kyiv.
Well, the events themselves are just the highest level of professionalism and diplomatic skills of our Embassy team, which was demonstrated by the third secretary of the Embassy for culture and public diplomacy Olga Segeda-Andreichuk, the second secretary for economic issues Ivan Segeda and other employees.
And I also managed to see with my own eyes what a huge amount of work is being done by the Embassy team to draw the attention of Kuwaitis to the war in Ukraine. And, of course, when I was given the floor during the presentation of the book, first of all, I focused not on football, but expressed gratitude to all countries that help Ukraine in this difficult period. At the same time, I managed to personally communicate with the US Ambassador and express sincere gratitude on behalf of all our compatriots to the American state for helping Ukraine from the first days of Russia's full-scale invasion.
Finally, following the results of the events, the government of Kuwait decided to help Ukrainians in the conditions of Russian shelling of energy infrastructure facilities - this country allocated funds for the purchase of a batch of generators for Ukraine,” Semenenko said.
Alexander Popov
