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Tom Hamilton
IT’S LATE OCTOBER, and in the early fall evening, three soccer matches are happening on a patch of artificial grass in Coram’s Fields, north London. On two of the three pitches, people are playing social soccer — the super-competitive kind — after work. The other pitch is hosting a four-team tournament between Scotland, Brighton, Arsenal and Shakhtar Stalevi.
Their shouts are familiar, that competitiveness unwavering. The players in the tournament are amputees: victims of landmines, casualties of war, those who lost limbs because of cancer, or road accidents. The clang of crutches connecting in midair and the thud as they hit the ground ring across this tiny corner of London.
The number of Ukrainians who have lost limbs since Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, varies depending on whom you ask. The true number is private, but is likely between 50,000, attributed to the Ukraine Health Ministry in November 2024, and 100,000, which Ukrainian Football Association president Andriy Shevchenko quoted in January 2025 when outlining why amputee football is a priority. “Football has a unique power to aid rehabilitation and recovery,” Shevchenko said.
Shakhtar Stalevi have 13 such players. Before the war, a couple were already soldiers, such as Stalevi’s first captain, Ivan. The rest were civilians who signed up to fight, apart from one player who was 12 when the war began.
Three of those players talk through their experiences in London. Andrii H., 34, was a senior machine operator at a plant producing corrugated cardboard. He has a wife and two children. “I was wounded on Oct. 16, 2022, during the liberation of Kherson province, specifically near the village of Veremiivka. I stepped on a land mine; my foot was blown up [and] my heel looked like a rose.”
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SC Featured: Shakhtar Stalevi – Made of Steel
In response to the war in Ukraine, one of the country’s most storied football clubs has formed an amputee team, offering players a renewed sense of purpose.
Andrii K., a father of three, worked in construction. “On May 10, 2023, I was positioned near Soledar. There was artillery bombardment, so we hid under a blindage in a trench. The artillery caught us. There were five of us inside. Two of my comrades in arms were killed on the spot, another one died while in intensive care, and I lost an arm and injured my leg.”
The home of Tymofii, a 14-year-old student, was hit by a Russian missile in March 2022. He sustained numerous shrapnel wounds to his head, body and limbs, and lost fingers on his right hand.
When Ukraine’s biggest club, Shakhtar Donetsk, heard stories such as Andrii H.’s, Andrii K.’s and Tymofii’s, they formed their own amputee football team through their nonprofit foundation, Shakhtar Social. The goal was to use soccer to help injured soldiers and civilians with their trauma and aid their rehabilitation. The players are from all corners of Ukraine, from different backgrounds and walks of life, but they share the experience of sustaining life-changing injuries during this war.
All of them found a new brotherhood in Stalevi. “Even after injuries, even after failures, we do not give up,” Andrii K says.
After the three-hour tournament, the players unwind at a local pub, where the TVs show the latest from the Ukraine-Russia war. Earlier in the day, they met Valerii Zaluzhnyi, who was commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces until February 2024, when he was made Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom. Tymofii shows some French tourists on a nearby table the pen Zaluzhnyi signed for him. They want to buy the players a drink, saying they’re heroes, but the three Shakhtar players politely decline, saying they’re just doing their duty.
Instead, they want to talk about football. The Stalevi players will meet Ukraine star Oleksandr Zinchenko after the Arsenal vs. Shakhtar Champions League match the next day. The conversation returns to Stalevi and a tournament they have in January 2025, called the League of Mighty. They’re desperate to improve, and impress. But all the while, they reference what this team means to them.
As Andrii H puts it: “Shakhtar is bringing me back to life.”
THE STALEVI PLAYERS meet and train three times a week in Kyiv. They head to training from the rehabilitation center, hospital, military centers, or from new jobs. Training is competitive, fast-paced and uncompromising, with every player pushing themselves to the limit.
“We know the number [of those injured and suffering amputations] is huge and we know that football is a tool for socialization and rehabilitation,” says Inna Khmyzova, director of Shakhtar Social. “The idea was to give the opportunity to our soldiers to find probably some hope, some goal in life and to do something good for them because they guarded us, and now we need to help them.”
Shakhtar Donetsk are 15-time Ukrainian Premier League champions. They were originally based in the Donbas region, in the east, but since Russian-backed separatists invaded that part of Ukraine in 2014, they have been forced into a nomadic existence. Over the past decade, they’ve played in Lviv and Kharkiv; now, their league matches take place in Kyiv and European games 1,600 miles to the west in Gelsenkirchen, Germany.
The team was formed Feb. 5, 2024. Shakhtar appointed Bohdan Bilko, an academy coach, as the team’s first manager. The team members all have stories about how they found Stalevi. After Andrii H. lost his leg stepping on a land mine in Veremiivka, he was evacuated to Kirovohrad (now Kropyvnyskyi), Vinnytsia and finally to Kyiv. “My most recent reamputation was in January 2024,” Andrii says. “I went through seven surgeries in total.” While recovering in the hospital from that final surgery, he was visited by ex-Shakhtar goalkeeper Andriy Pyatov. As part of Pyatov’s ambassadorial duties for the club, he travelled to hospitals and rehabilitation centers looking for potential players to join the team. In one hospital in Kyiv, he met Andrii H.
They gave the team’s founding players suggestions for what the team could be called. “For us, we didn’t want to emphasize every time that it’s amputee football, that it’s for people who got injured,” Khmyzova says. They opted to call themselves “Shakhtar Stalevi,” loosely translated as “Made of Steel.” “This is a team of strong, unbreakable Ukrainian men … we are just getting started,” Andrii H. says.
Andrii loves football and adored watching ex-Ukraine striker Andriy Shevchenko. “After the injury, Shakhtar is bringing me back to physical life, changing the direction of my development,” Andrii says. “We keep developing, but now as footballers. It’s been a great change in activity.”
Andrii chats through the last year while handling his new day job as a delivery driver in Kyiv. “I wanted to go back [to the front],” he says. “But my wife is totally against it — she doesn’t want me to return at all. A lot of people have these thoughts.” This afternoon, he has heavy carpets to transport, but his right leg is hurting from playing football. The rules of amputee soccer say outfield players must take off their prosthetics when playing, instead propelling themselves on crutches. Goalkeepers tuck their injured arm inside their shirt. As Andrii stops at various drop-off points, he hops up and down from the truck with ease. Stalevi keeps him active.
“Shakhtar Stalevi FC is like another family to me. There is my civilian family, my military family, and now there also is my football family. I have two reasons to live now: my family and football.”
One of Andrii’s closest friends on Stalevi is Valentyn, 23. “[Before the war] I woke up like an ordinary student, I washed my face, went to university, went to class. I wanted them to pass by quicker so I could get to football practice, go to discos, or to walk, or relax. I was young. I loved life.”
On the evening of Feb. 23, 2022, he played football with his friends; he woke up to Putin announcing the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. A day later, he enlisted.
On June 23, 2023, he was sent to help the counteroffensive against Russia-occupied Klishchiivka, a village in eastern Ukraine. The next time he woke up, he was in the hospital, having sustained a bullet wound to his right leg above the knee. “The bullet had ricocheted very hard and broke the arteries. There was no blood supply to the lower limb. They told me they tried a prosthetic artery to restore blood flow. They didn’t succeed, so out of desperation, they simply cut off the leg. That’s all.”
He recalls how after the injury, he used to lie in his hospital bed wondering if he’d play football again. Then he found Stalevi. “Football was initially a kind of rehabilitation for me, even psychological,” Valentyn says. “[Before Stalevi] I had two hours of classes with rehabilitation specialists and a whole free day. And you spend the whole free day lying in bed in four white walls, looking at the white ceiling. And now there is Shakhtar: somewhere I can go to relax, and also to play football. That’s cool.”
Bohdan is the team’s head coach. He used to work with children, spending four years coaching in Shakhtar Donetsk’s football academy. When he was offered the chance to start Stalevi, he had a limited understanding of the amputee game.
“I had to ask myself, ‘How useful would I be to these guys? How can I help them? Would I be able to teach them?’ And once I realized I could and I would indeed be able to do that, I immediately agreed to take this position,” Bohdan says. “This is a new experience for me, just as it is for them. We all learn together.”
They had just a handful of players for their first training session, but he had to shape a squad. For goalkeepers such as Andrii K. and Tymofii, he saw an early hurdle. “From what I’ve observed, goalkeepers have a sort of psychological barrier preventing them from falling down because [falling on the residual limb] hurts like hell,” Bohdan says. “This is objective No. 1 for goalkeepers: to overcome this fear and put your technique into action — jump, fall, regroup.”
Some of the Shakhtar and Ukraine players donated spare kits. Andrii K. received a pair of gloves from Benfica and Ukraine goalkeeper Anatoliy Trubin. “I only needed the right one; the other goalkeeper got the left one,” Andrii K. says.
As the players grew closer, Bohdan could see their healing process. “Their emotions have become more vivid, they have become more open,” he says. The first captain of Stalevi is Ivan, a 28-year-old from Poltava. He speaks quietly, but deliberately, with soft authority. The armband was handed to him by Taras Stepanenko, the captain of Shakhtar’s first team. “The key thing is to never bring disgrace to this armband, like you should never bring disgrace to your [military] unit, the emblem of your club or the captain’s armband,” Ivan says.
The players didn’t conform to military rank when they joined the team; they joined as equals. “Each and every one of them is indeed a leader,” Bohdan says. “That is something I understand and feel.”
AFTER EACH PRACTICE, the players go for tea or coffee in a Kyiv café near where they train. They talk about the team, their family, Shakhtar’s form in the Champions League and what players the team should sign. It’s what they don’t talk about that stands out.
“The important thing about it is that guys have a chat with each other,” Ivan explains. “That is a rare moment and a rare setting in which soldiers do not discuss war because each and every time we meet, we eventually start recalling events from the war. Here, we can talk for hours with no one even mentioning the military service. It helps with PTSD.”
Ivan, one of the few players who was in the army before Russia’s invasion, loves these breaks. When Russian-backed separatists invaded the Donbas region on the east border of Ukraine in 2014, Ivan enlisted and served in the signal corps for a year. He decided to live elsewhere in Europe from 2015 to 2019, but the pull of Ukraine remained constant. “Why build something in Europe when I can build something here, in my own country?”
On Feb. 23, 2022, the day after the full-scale invasion was announced, he signed up again. By the following April, Ivan was sent into the “gray zone,” a no-man’s land between Ukrainian and Russian forces not strictly controlled by either force. “On Sept. 2, 2023, we had a routine mission — our special forces unit was conducting reconnaissance in the gray zone.” Besides combat, he was tasked with finding his injured or fallen comrades so they could be evacuated or their bodies collected.
“After completing the task, I touched an explosive device on the way out,” Ivan says. “My right leg flew away very quickly. I said over the radio that ‘Stal-300, everything is fine, I’m left-handed.’ So maybe it helps me play football now that I still have my leading leg.
“Thanks to the heroism and coordinated actions of the guys, they got me out quickly. That’s not always the case in the gray zone,” Ivan says. “My evacuation took four hours. The second leg was initially saved — I had a tourniquet. If the evacuation had taken eight hours instead of four, both legs would have been amputated. But overall, my injury wasn’t the worst. I immediately called my mother and told her, ‘My head’s fine, my spine is intact, my stomach is fine.'”
Ivan’s treatment lasted four months. “The longest part of rehabilitation was waiting for the leg to shrink [Ed. Note: the swelling must go down before a patient can be fitted for prosthetics and associated connectors]. That’s when they adjust the prosthetic sockets,” Ivan says.
He found Stalevi by chance. He was walking near the rehabilitation center in Kyiv and bumped into someone — Bohdan — wearing a full Shakhtar tracksuit. The two chatted about this plan to start a football team. “I told our medical service about this initiative, and they invited other guys, too. And this is how the very first players appeared,” Ivan says.
“The thing that kills you is not the injury, not the fact that you lack an extremity, but it is the idleness, lack of activity, that is a military man’s undoing. Football is about trust, just like in the military. Without trust and understanding, nothing works.”
At Stalevi, Ivan found friendship, but he also found love. Ivan used Stalevi to get back to his peak fitness, but also integral to his recovery was his physical therapist (and now Stalevi head medic) Olya. “You could say she taught me how to walk again,” he says. As his recovery progressed, their sessions became more infrequent, but the two stayed in contact. She helped him get used to his prosthetic leg; he taught her how to drive.
In August, the team was at a joint training session with amputee teams from Cherkasy and Lviv. Ivan proposed to her there, in front of his teammates.
“She helps the guys in every possible way,” Ivan says. “She approaches physical therapy from multiple angles. She treats the guys — massages, taping, dry needling, acupuncture. And she’s a perfect fit for the role because she truly cares. She’s a volunteer by nature. Maybe all these paths were leading me to her.
“I love her very much. She’s my everything.” The two have a daughter together, with another child on the way.
IT’S JAN. 11, 2025, and the prematch scene in the Shakhtar changing room is like any other. Andrii H. is having his lower back massaged. Andrii K. has his head down, wondering whether he’ll be picked in goal. Ivan is lost in thought. Other players sit hunched forward listening; some have already taken off their prosthetic legs, pulling Shakhtar socks over the ends of their amputated legs.
Bohdan is using magnets on a whiteboard to explain some tactical plans. “Do you have inner strength? What is football compared to this?” Bohdan says to the team. “But these qualities help you dominate your opponent. And today, the one who maintains concentration the longest, who is more disciplined, and who wants it more — that’s who will succeed. This is what makes the difference.”
These are Ivan’s first and last matches as captain as they face MSC Dnipro in the opening match of the League of Mighty. Before the tournament starts, Shevchenko — the legendary former Chelsea and AC Milan striker — addresses the players and supporters. “This first UAF amputee football tournament demonstrates that nothing is impossible when there is determination and a supportive team,” he says.
Five teams take part. There is a new mixed team called AMP FC Kyiv, MSC Dnipro from Cherkasy, two from Lviv — FC Pokrova AMP and FC Pokrova-2 — and then, Stalevi. Shakhtar draw with MSC Dnipro and lose to AMP FC Kyiv 2-0.
Ahead of Day 2, after a small ceremony in the changing room, Ivan passes the captaincy to 23-year-old Valentyn. “Valik was one of the first to join,” Ivan explains. “And he is very involved in the life of the team in all its aspects, with the guys and organization. That’s why he is the one.”
Due to the difficult logistics, Shakhtar play friendly matches against the other four Ukrainian amputee teams once or twice a month, but their first official tournament — the League of Mighty — came in January. Ivan captained the team, but it was also his last appearance in a Shakhtar shirt for a while. “I want this to progress, and I want more people to join. In the long run, I believe our team of military amputees will win international tournaments. A team of soldiers should be unbeatable. These are people who fight to the end.”
Ivan is heading back to the front line. “You could compare it to firefighters putting out a burning house. They don’t leave the job unfinished. It’s my profession. If a firefighter gets a burn that doesn’t prevent him from working, he won’t quit,” Ivan says. “Some think losing a limb is the end. No, it’s not the end. I got married.”
A couple of days after the tournament, Valentyn is in the rehabilitation center, having a new prosthesis fitted. He’s lying on a table, flicking through photos of the tournament, a machine is providing pain relief to his amputated leg.
Shakhtar finished the tournament without a win, but they scored their first goal. It came against Pokrova AMP, when Ruslan, 36, picked up the ball on the halfway line, dribbled closer to Pokrova AMP’s goal and struck a beautiful shot across the keeper into the bottom left-hand corner. Ruslan fell to the ground, face down, exhausted. Ivan was the first to congratulate him before he was engulfed by teammates. Valentyn and Ivan helped him back onto his leg.
Valentyn smiles as he’s asked about the honor of being named captain after Ivan, and how his perspective of life has changed. “What has changed [in my life]? Maybe nothing has changed radically: the vision of the world, the vision of life in general and the meaning of life. I just became a little more aware of something that I didn’t realize before, for example. I just remember, I used to constantly complain and now I understand — well, I was a fool. Everything was fine.”
Valentyn was the unanimous choice to succeed Ivan, and it’s his role to lead them to their first win. He’s asked what he hopes to achieve in this role: “To live up to the hopes of those who entrusted me with this captain’s armband, who wanted me to become captain.”
IT’S FEB. 4, 2025, and Shakhtar Stalevi are celebrating their first birthday. A handful of players meet, including Valentyn, Andrii H. and Tymofii. They pose for a group photo, in front of orange and black balloons and a golden No. 1. Over the past year, they had 104 training sessions and played 12 friendly matches. In that time, more amputee teams are forming in Ukraine, and there’s a tournament in England in April in which Stalevi hope to play. The hope is all five Ukrainian teams from the League of Mighty will travel, while Brighton and Arsenal will feature again, alongside West Brom, Ireland and Scotland. The Stalevi players are keen to show the other teams how much they’ve improved since their matches in October.
Tymofii is still at school in Kyiv, but has practice three times a week after classes. “It’s a very important team for me,” he says. “I had a dream before the war to play for Shakhtar and this dream came true during the war.”
Andrii H. is eager to improve as a player in Stalevi’s midfield, but his appreciation for life now is partly defined by the devastation he witnessed on the front lines. “You need to appreciate things,” he says. “You need to appreciate what you have today. Tomorrow may never come. That’s the harshness of the present. Appreciate your loved ones, your family, your surroundings and appreciate in general what you have, what you’ve achieved. Don’t be envious because you have what some people don’t have at all.”
Team captain Valentyn wants to lead the team in the same manner as Ivan, but he has his own hopes, too. “My goal is to run 50 meters on asphalt. To run and be out of breath, to be out of oxygen,” Valentyn says. “That’s what I really want. But I understand wanting is not enough, you need to work on it.”
Stalevi continue to welcome new players. The brutality of war means there are new amputees every day. Bohdan has been there for all 104 training sessions and has witnessed the benefits this team can offer. “They have a fierce desire to play,” Bohdan says. “I see the fire in their eyes. And when I see them play against other teams, they forget about everything.
“They have an understanding that life goes on. I’ve been experiencing what every other Ukrainian has been experiencing: tragedy, sadness. But by and large, that said, there is hope.
“I understand I can be useful for our guys, for our veterans. This [rehabilitation] process is a two-way street. I think that football helps them a lot to resolve their issues, their tasks, their personal stuff. Many of them used to dream of playing for Shakhtar FC. And that dream became a reality, as today they are Shakhtar Stalevi FC players.”
After the celebrations, the team pack up the balloons, Tymofii grabs the golden No. 1, and they head to the benches where they detach their prosthetic limbs. Training starts soon. “Each of us is recovering in our own manner, but we stick together, we are one team, supporting each other,” Andrii H. says. “So I think everything is going to be all right.”