NY Times · May 14, 2023
When Your Champions League Dream Runs Through a War Zone
Lassina Traoré said he returned to Shakhtar as a matter of honor. “For me, it was time to give back the love they gave me before.”Credit...Kacper Pempel/ReutersBy the time Lassina Traoré returned to his team, everybody else was gone.
In 2021, Traoré, a forward from Burkina Faso, had joined the other expensive foreign recruits lured to Ukraine by the country’s perennial soccer champion, Shakhtar Donetsk. Back then, Traoré played in a team built around a Brazilian core, supplemented by other foreign talent and some of Ukrainian soccer’s best players, for a club that was regarded as arguably the top team in Eastern Europe. Then the Russian bombs began to fall, and everything changed.