Svyatik Artemenko travelled from Guelph, Ontario, to Ukraine at the end of January to play professional soccer. A few weeks later, he found himself at the frontlines of Europe’s most brutal war in decades. His life’s journey—from Odesa on the Black Sea coast, to Winnipeg as an immigrant, then back to Odesa as a soldier—is quintessentially Canadian.
Podillya FC is a team based in Khmelnytskyi, around 500 kilometres northwest of Odesa. To be candid, it wasn’t my first choice. I would have loved to play for Chornomorets FC, Odesa’s home team, or Dynamo in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. Both are in Ukraine’s Premier League, and I’ve always dreamed of playing at the top level in the country where I was born.
I tried to push that idea out of my mind. My country was being invaded, and there I was thinking about soccer. It was stupid. As I looked out my window into the darkness, I thought about my friends in Odesa and the summers I’d spent there as a child. All of it was under threat. I was stunned, and angry. I decided at that moment that I would join the fight for Ukraine.Odesa is the most beautiful place in the world, a city of more than a million people that feels like a seaside town.
Over the next years they worked hard to build a middle-class life. They had two more kids—my sister, Nika, and brother, Glev—bought a house just north of the city centre and settled into a working-class routine. It wasn’t perfect, of course. My parents missed their homeland, their family and their friends. When I was a kid, we would go back to Odesa every summer. For my parents, it was like refilling their energy tanks before heading back to the freezing Canadian prairie.
I talked to some of my new Ukrainian teammates with Podillya, who told me they were all enlisting in the country’s military. A few hours later I was lining up at the army recruitment office in Khmelnytskyi. The queue was longer than I’d expected, stretching a block down the street before doubling back to the entrance. The Ukrainian military was already drafting men between 18 and 60 years old before the invasion started, but as soon as the war was on, people were rushing to volunteer.
I never found out whether he was a spy. If not, it was stupid of him to be acting suspiciously when things were so tense. Odesa wasn’t being bombed in the same way as other cities, but everyone was preparing for the worst. Occasionally one of the Russian warships lined up on the Black Sea would launch a missile. One hit the airport. The Russians had even tried to deploy a landing party in Koblevo, just east of Odesa, but were repelled by Ukrainian forces.
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