The resurgence of football in Bucha, after the Russian massacres

The first Ukrainian football championship following the Russian invasion ends on Sunday on a large scale. In the Prem’er Liha, the top flight, Shakhtar Donetsk won again, overcoming their rivals Dnipro-1 with a match to spare. It was an alienating championship: fans were forbidden to enter, while some matches lasted up to five hours due to the anti-aircraft sirens, which players and staff waited for in the bunkers below the stadiums. At the beginning of the championship, Desna Chernihiv and Mariupol withdrew from the Premier Liha. Their arenas have been heavily hit by Kremlin missiles.

In another town, which in March 2022 became the symbol of Moscow’s indiscriminate massacres against the civilian population, football contributed to a gradual, yet surreal, return to normal life. It happened in Bucha, the place where the massacres of Russian troops have upset the perception of this war. «A football team from the selo, militant in the Druha Liha» is the bio of the Instagram profile of the Nyva Buzova. The Druha Liha is the Ukrainian C seriesbut the club’s social media manager may soon change the description, since the team has won the championship and has the right to move up to the second division, in which, however, participation is still uncertain. Selo, on the other hand, is the Ukrainian-Russian definition of villages on the edge of cities, the very soul of post-Soviet countries. The team is in fact based in Buzova, a village of just 1,500 inhabitants on the outskirts of Bucha, where Russian soldiers have passed on their destructive march.

Nyva is a term that has been associated with some Ukrainian provincial teams since the Soviet era (between amateurs and professionals, there are eight teams with this name, followed by the local one to distinguish them from the others). The meaning of the term is, literally, “a plot or strip of land on which crops of grain grow”. Therefore, it identifies the status of an agrarian team, i.e. coming from places where the land is the primary economic asset and in communist times the employees of kolkhozes, the large collectivized agricultural factories, played on it. The small 253-seat stadium is in fact immersed in the nature of the cultivated plains of the Kyiv oblast.

The pitch is surrounded by around 15,000 trees, replanted by the players and staff on the eve of the championship. Other than a pre-season retreat, “the first months of the season were hard work: the village had suffered the clashes of last spring and even the field kept the signs of Russian artillery and bombs” explains club president Oktay Efendiyev, who is also the chairman of the assembly of citizens of Azerbaijani origin in Ukraine and a member of the committee of minorities of Ukraine.

The striker of the club Ivan Sonov, elected best player of the championship, told how the field was cleared of players with the use of metal detectors, on the eve of the championship. The players, some of them with various experiences in Premier Liha teams and even with sporadic appearances in the national youth teams, certainly did not expect this welcome when they accepted the transfer, but they gladly accepted to participate physically in the resurgence of the small club, at his first participation among professionals.

“The team’s goal was to finish in the top three at the start of the season,” says the Ukrainian-Azerbaijani president, who fell in love with football by watching the Dynamo Kyiv exploits of Colonel Valerij Lobanovsky and the young Andriy Shevchenko in the late 1990s. At the end of the season, Nyva Buzova only lost one game and dominated the league. Despite the ban on access to fans, the Nyva ultras group made up of around a hundred people and called UBN (Ultras Buzivchany Nyvy) accompanied the team from outside the stadium. Their choreographies with smoke bombs of different colors have toured the Ukraine.

Vladyslav Podolianyuk played for Nyva in the province’s amateur leagues. He is now the vice president of the team. “We are waiting for the certificate to be released to talk about Serie B next year,” he says. From there the step towards the first division, and the realization of the dream of facing Dynamo and Shakhtar, is very short. On the other hand, in Prem’er Liha for some years there have already been three teams from the Ukrainian selos: Kolos Kovalivka (Kyiv oblast), Minaj (in the Transcarpathian region) and Inhulets (near Kirovohrad). Total population of the three villages: 11,600 inhabitants.