Paulo Fonseca’s harsh testimony from Kiev: “I don’t know how I’m going to get out of here”

The war has started in Ukraine. The Russian army began its attack on the Ukrainian country on Thursday, February 24, and the world of football is no stranger to the conflict. The Football League in Ukraine has been suspended and several footballers have asked for help to leave the country.

Coach Paulo Fonseca is one of the thousands of people who has been trapped in Kiev and has explained his situation in the Jornal de Noticias newspaper. The Portuguese, who is currently without a team, married a Ukrainian, Katerina Ostroushko, whom he met when he was managing Shakhtar Donetsk. Both reside in the Ukrainian capital and have not been able to leave the country after the Russian attack and the closure of airspace.

“I woke up at five in the morning with five explosions in a row,” he recalls in the Portuguese newspaper. I had a flight scheduled for today (Thursday), but now it’s impossible to get out of here, because the airports are already destroyed and the airspace has been closed,” he explains.

The coach and his family are in a hotel with his old team and the prospects of leaving Kiev are very complicated since you can only leave by road via Lviv towards Poland but the traffic jams are constant: “The only thing we can do is pray so that a bomb doesn’t drop on us. Honestly, I don’t know how I’m going to get out of here. It’s the worst day of my life. Now we just have to wait and be lucky. Lucky to get out of Ukraine and leave the war behind,” he added Fonseca.