Stranded Players, Desperate Calls and a Race to Flee Kyiv

Inside the windowless conference room of the Kyiv hotel where the soccer stars had gathered, the anxiety was growing by the minute. An aborted attempt to flee had been a disaster. And the sounds of war — mortar fire, rocket blasts, screeching warplanes — provided a near constant reminder of their precarious circumstances.

By Saturday morning the group, made up mostly of Brazilians but now swelled by other South Americans and Italians, numbered as many as 70. The players had come to Ukraine to play soccer; weeks earlier, they had taken the field in Champions League, Europe’s richest competition. Now, with their season suspended and Russian forces advancing on the city, they were huddled with their families — wives, partners, young children, aging relatives — and plotting how, and when, to make a run for their lives.

“I hope everything will be OK,” one of the stranded Brazilian players, Junior Moraes, said Saturday morning in an interview with The New York Times. Moraes, a forward for the Ukrainian club Shakhtar Donetsk, explained how the group had been hustled to the hotel last week by their team. In the days that followed, as first the country and then the city had come under attack, their ranks expanded after foreign players from a rival club, Dynamo Kyiv, asked to join them.

Fearing for their safety and their families’, the players had released a short video that quickly went viral. Food was in short supply, the players said. Necessities like diapers had already run out.

“We are here asking for your help,” the Shakhtar player Marlon Santos said, citing the obstacles. “There’s no way we can get out.”