Fonseca, trapped in Kyiv: “It’s impossible to get out of here. The airports have been destroyed.”
The former Shakhtar coach lives in Ukraine with his wife, who is a Ukrainian citizen. They were in Kyiv when the Russian military attacks began.
Paulo Fonseca, the Portuguese coach who managed Shakhtar Donetsk for several years, found himself trapped in a hotel in Kyiv after the outbreak between Russia and Ukraine. Fonseca, who is married to a Ukrainian woman, spoke to “Jornal de Noticias” and talked about the complicated situation.
“I woke up at five in the morning to five explosions in a row,” he explained. It was at that moment that he realized the attacks had begun. “I had a flight booked for today, but now it’s impossible to get out of here because the airports have been destroyed and the airspace has been closed,” said the coach.
Fonseca has been witness to the chaos in the country: “At the moment, you can only leave Kyiv by land and everyone is trying to escape to Lviv, a city near Poland. The roads are completely stopped because it’s impossible to circulate with so many cars. The lines are huge. On top of that, there’s no more gas. The only thing we can do is pray that a bomb doesn’t fall on us. Honestly, I don’t know how I’m going to get out of here,” he says.
Fonseca is locked up in the same hotel where the Shakhtar players are staying. “It’s the worst day of my life. Now we just have to wait and hope to be lucky. Lucky to get out of Ukraine and leave the war behind,” he says fearfully.