Manchester City player on the atrocities back home and his frustration with former teammates in Russia who do not speak out
Ukrainians do not have the luxury of shielding themselves from bad news. “I can’t live outside this situation,” Oleksandr Zinchenko says. “Trying to follow everything is basically my life now. The first thing I do every day is reach for my phone, and then it’s in my hand constantly. It’s been more than seven weeks now and you can see some people starting to forget, starting to adapt to the brutality in my country. No, no, no. People are starving, dying, bodies being discovered, so how can anyone relax? You have to talk even more. I hate the people who invaded our land more and more and more every day. I won’t stop talking about it, because the whole world has to know the truth.”
That is the exhausting but grimly necessary reality for Zinchenko and his compatriots. Every action is cast in the shadow of Russia’s invasion, with its barbaric consequences, and among the biggest concerns is that people outside become desensitised. It simply would not do and, on an Easter weekend when professional commitments bring an FA Cup semi-final for Manchester City against Liverpool, he wants to use his platform. For almost an hour his anger pours out, sometimes in controlled rage but often in raw expressions of hurt. Words can capture people’s attention but, in whatever order, they still cannot rationalise exactly what is happening inside Ukraine.
