Mykola Neseniuk: "The war started with football"

The well-known journalist Mykola Nesenyuk recalled the idea of creating a joint football championship between Ukraine and Russia.

"The tumultuous events of recent times have forgotten the events that were, as is now finally clear, the harbingers of the current great trouble. If only we had known then...

Everyone has now managed to forget (or wanted to forget) how in the summer of 2013 the main stadium of Ukraine hosted the "tournament's opening game" football matches between our Shakhtar and Dynamo and their Spartak and Zenit. From the outside, these games seemed to be no different from similar tournaments involving our teams and theirs, which have been held periodically since the nineties, either in Ukraine, Israel or the United States. But those were obviously exhibition competitions that had no claim to anything else. Even for the sake of nostalgia - the last Channel One Cup in Israel was empty - our emigrants and theirs were not interested in games between teams that had long ago played for the championship of the defunct USSR. So this tournament was cancelled due to unprofitability and the almost complete lack of any interest from the audience.

In the summer of 2013, it was not the case - the "Abedinion Tournament" was openly called a rehearsal for the "Abedinionnava Championate", which was to begin the following year. An organising committee was set up, a calendar was drawn up and a prize fund was announced, comparable to that of the UEFA Champions League. In response, the vast majority of my Ukrainian journalist colleagues were choked with excitement, discussing "how interesting this is going to be!"

It was strange, to say the least - people who could remember the score of the Portuguese championship match in September 1879 in the middle of the night suddenly went blind! After all, everyone who was even slightly familiar with the constituent documents of international football institutions knew that such an "abiding championship" was impossible in principle. International recognition of a joint championship with the aggressor country was possible only in one case - when Ukraine became one state with it. I shouted about this in every possible and impossible way. I explained that our agreement to the "united championship" would be the first step towards our conquest, a kind of referendum among football fans, after which the rest of Ukrainians would vote for "unification", or at least the majority needed for this. Why not? The majority had voted for Yanukovych three years earlier!

And then came the second Maidan, in the midst of which, in February 2014, Shakhtar and Metalist travelled to Israel for an "abduction supercamp". Even then, the enemy did not believe that the football "reunion" would work out. They even had the audacity to send an invitation to Dynamo Kyiv to play a match with Spartak Kyiv in honour of the opening of the latter's stadium. Of course, Dynamo did not go anywhere. It was after the shooting of the Maidan, after Crimea and everything else. But not everyone got it then. Among Ukrainian journalists, there were those who went to the enemy for the 2016 World Cup and wrote from there in Russian how everything was "healthy" there!

And then the great war came, and I hope everyone realised how the enemy's "interest" ends. Now, all those who were once delighted with the "abyedinionnava champion" have become patriots of Ukraine. And this is the most important thing! We will win the war. And our football championship will one day be one of the strongest in the world!" Nesenyuk wrote on his Facebook page.