The football hooligans fighting for Ukraine
“Tottenham were hard. They fought well.” Vitalii Ovcharenko pauses and sips his tea, having earlier refused my offer of a beer. “I remember it clearly. There weren’t many of them and they were heavily watched by the police. But, still, they managed to give the police the slip and get into the city, where we were already hunting them. We always tried to fight foreign fans who came to Donetsk. Finally, our scouts informed us where they were: about 10-15 hooligans had been seen in the centre, and we attacked. I must give them credit — the Tottenham fans were tougher than Celtic and Manchester United, especially in terms of their morality.”
What does he mean by “morality”? “Being an effective hooligan is about many things, but in the end it comes down to how brave you are, and from this internal force — we call it a ‘moral’ force — comes your physical success. In that respect, football hooliganism is very similar to fighting in a war.”
Vitalii is unique, even among the variegated pool of characters I have met in almost a decade of covering Ukraine. A Special Forces soldier, a social media guru responsible for reaching out to the Russians, and an intellectual with a PhD in “the political, economic and social relations between Ukraine and Scandinavia”, he is also a former leading member of Shakhtar Donetsk’s football hooligan firm, “Sever-8”.
Vitalii doesn’t look like your average member of Ukrainian infantry, or indeed any member of a football gang. Tall, thin, delicate-featured, and wearing a black roll neck, he looks more like a French existentialist. But now he is very much a soldier — albeit an odd one.
He first joined up in 2014 for a year, before returning at the start of last year’s all-out invasion, when the Russians were just miles from Kyiv. Along with a small group of comrades, he drove through the forests deep into occupied territory to conduct reconnaissance. In those early days, it was particularly dangerous: no-one knew where or exactly how many Russian soldiers there were. But, through some help from Ukrainian citizens, he eventually managed to get their coordinates and their bases were destroyed by Ukrainian artillery. “Yes, I was only a transmitter of information,” he says. “But it was very nice to learn later how many Russian occupiers were killed as a result of my work.”
But it soon emerged that he could do so much more than pick off occupying forces. Vitalii was born in the Donetsk region and lived there until just before the beginning of the Russian occupation, in 2014. Before the war, he explains, it was “morally” difficult to fight in the places where you lived when you were a child. But now this is a strength; unlike many of his army friends from other regions, he understands the local history and nuances of Donetsk. “I know what I am fighting for as a soldier and fighting for as a social activist, because every day I see the broken villages and cities of my region. I don’t need to talk about patriotism or love for the motherland. Every house destroyed by the Russians says more than all the phrases about patriotism ever could…”
